by J.W. Wang
I first came upon Miranda July in the January 2007 issue of Harper’s, where I’d read her very short story, “The Swim Team.” The story immediately struck me for a variety of reasons: it was brief, less than two pages long; it was a straight monologue; it didn’t seem to have a specific point; it didn’t feel like it was trying very hard to capture all of humanity, or even some particularly important aspect of it in its brief length; it was oddly straightforward and without big bells and whistles (like George Saunders’s ghosts or Garcia Marquez’s angel falling from the sky); it was entirely implausible and must have been magical, then, in its implausibility, what with old people swimming on dry carpet and their heads in fish bowls, but magical in a very our-world and do-it-yourself sort of way. It was not anything like what I expected from a major literary publication.
At the time I questioned the literary merits of such a short and strangely whimsical piece. Why is this supposed to be so good? It’s a bunch of old people pretending to swim on a carpet, with their heads in fish bowls. There’s not a lot of detailed description. There’s a lot of telling. And nothing really happens by the end. It’s as if I was looking for reasons to dismiss the work, on the grounds that it didn’t read like what we’ve come to expect from “truly literary” work. There was no great love lost, there was no violent act that changed someone forever. There was no change, in fact, an anathema to creative writing workshops, and worse, there were no tangible stakes involved. A woman got a bunch of old people together and they pretended to swim by sticking their heads in fish bowls. End of story.
What I found in the days, months, and then years that followed, was that I couldn’t stop thinking about that story, however handicapped it was with the absence of these essentials storytellers have been beaten to look for and cultivate. The story was interesting and oddly bizarre, bizarre in a way that makes it hard to dismiss, and it gave me an image I couldn’t shake: old people flailing their arms in air, dragging them along carpeting, heads immersed in fish bowls filled with water. Certainly there was something ultimately reflective of humanity in that, even if the narrator had nothing to lose, even if there was no actual physical tension in present action, even if nobody went through a great spiritual transformation. I couldn’t shake the image, and the emotions that lurked behind such a scene. Yes, surely there was.
Nearly every one of the stories in No One Belongs Here More Than You is written in first person (with the exception of a short three-pager), with the same July voice—which I feared initially, thinking this would set up the book for a boring, repetitive read, yet somehow July managed to give us such different perspectives and such unique situations that each story stands out from the others. We have the swimming teacher, we have a woman who falls in love with her Korean neighbor downstairs and slinks down for what she deludes herself to think is an affair, only to find the man in a seizure and his wife barking at her; we have a teenage lesbian running off with her best friend to live in a roach-infested apartment, losing her lover and making ends meet by working as a peepshow dancer.
July treads that fine space between reality and dream. Part of this is done through the language: she avoids the use of quotation marks, which lends a hyper-interior feel to her stories as we shift back and forth between thought, narration, action and dialogue, across blurred lines. This allows July to whisk between the real and the imaginary: In “Majesty” we have a narrator who speaks of her sister’s habit of recounting her sexual exploits over the phone, then we hear of an actual sexual exploit from the narrator, only to be whisked across dialogue and narration lines to find out she was recounting the exploit for her sister, immediately followed by the revelation that the encounter was in fact a made-up story, and we are shown the actual encounter—all in a series of dream-like sequences that transition smoothly from reality to imaginary and back. Of course, this is helped along by injections of July’s signature quirkiness: we get a woman driving around looking for a lost dog named Potato, and we get the same woman driving back with dead Potato, glaring at the narrator. Implicated is the guilt all of us feel: that somehow we are at fault for things not being better, that we are to blame for Potato’s death, that we are sad creatures for not being more than who we are.
July makes ample use of familiar language, concepts we are often told to avoid in writing, but she uses it deftly and balances it with shockingly clear details and insights that not only validate the concepts but seems to elevate them, even. Take this line from “Something That Needs Nothing”: “I wanted her to know, from the moment she heard my voice, that I was dying. I delivered a salutation so craven, so wretched, that it fell through language like pebbles. Hello.” We start with familiar ideas and concepts, “salutation” and “wretched” and “craven,” big no-nos in showy writing, but then the line ends with such a visceral, image-based delivery, the synesthesia of words falling (and sounding) like pebbles, that everything that came before it became magnified somehow, took on a more visceral feel.
What I found in No One Belongs Here More than You is a mother lode of the very humanity hinted through the old men and women crawling their way across the room in “The Swim Team,” or the man who waits and waits (and is destined never) to meet Victor’s sister in “The Sister,” the wistful yearning that beckons behind every Miranda July character. We are flawed, all of us. We all deeply wish we were special beings capable of doing more than what we do, but it’s because we long to be special when we are not that we are human. July captures this aching quality beautifully and brilliantly in each of the short stories in this collection, a tight and cohesive bundle of stories, each of which offers a little hurt and recognition, implication that we are, in fact, the people who belong in this world.
