The First Bad Man

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There’s a Bad Sex in Fiction award given yearly by the (British) Guardian newspaper. Miranda July will not win. All the sex in this novel is bad, but it's deliberately very bad, wince-inducing, and there’s quite a lot of it. I will spare you the details but do not read most of this book while eating cereals, they may well go up your nose. I just wanted to tell you I saw Dr. Broyard.” There was a long pause. “The chromotherapist,” I added. Writing about this book and talking about it with other readers has made me question my own judgement. It sounds funny. You’re right Lena, it does sound fresh! There are great lines, there are interesting ideas about relationships and the characters are truly unique. It is, I believe, even pretty funny.

Miranda July, you wonderfully weird creature. This book is probably one of the craziest things I've ever read, but it works, absolutely and completely. She crafts sentences that make you think the world was missing something until they were written. She finds genuine humor in the sadness, and poignancy in the mundane. I don’t know—morning?” It was only February. By June Phillip and I might be a couple, we might come to Dr. Broyard’s together, hand in hand. This is a book about Quirkily Insane and unlikeable caricatures doing Quirkily Insane and unlikeable things. Unfortunately the book wants you to root for its protagonist and this just isn't going to happen.

Table of Contents

Interactive Narrator: "Red Hot Riding Hood" begins this way, with the Wolf, Red Riding Hood and Granny complaining about doing the same story the same way every time. Despite being, plotwise, so bonkersly unlike anything you have ever thought of before, I don't mean to suggest that it's absurdist or surreal or Naked Lunch–ian or anything like that. It's normal people doing things that are only a beat or two off of normal; you just have to go with it, and then before you know it it has become perfectly reasonable and you're on to the next thing. Miranda July — filmmaker, performance artist and now novelist — is ready to leave the old Miranda July behind. You know the one: The curly haired gamin, her impossibly blue eyes swirling with ideas. The irrepressible creative blowing cinematic kisses to the world… The First Bad Man is about to complicate the picture. Striking and sexually bold, it reveals a side that is darker and that, truth be told, has lurked in her work all along…Though The First Bad Man actively challenges a reader's comfort zone, July creates a female neurotic archetype that's familiar and fresh at once.”

This may also have been because at the time The Hays Code prohibited the sound of flatulence in film, even if it was made by blowing a raspberry. Miranda July’s debut novel can be considered to be her third movie after Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) and The Future (2011). I assume it was written as prose because she couldn’t get another movie off the ground. It’s easy to imagine the film adaption with her in the lead role.Sometimes I just need a book to take me completely out of my own world and to someplace else altogether. This time I don’t mean the armchair travel sort of story. I need something that doesn’t make me have to sit and reflect on my own life. I want a novel that is so far out there that I can just sit and bask in its weirdness, but at the same time marvel at its cleverness. A book that can make me laugh and one that can make me say “Oh, how wonderfully rude!” When I saw Goodreads friend Justin had read this, I couldn’t resist the intrigue I felt while reading his review. I put the book on hold right away. When it came in I took a peek at the first paragraph while at work. I laughed out loud and then had to explain myself. Or rather, Miranda July needed to explain herself. I knew I was going to follow through with the whole thing.

In The First Bad Man, Miranda July tells the story of Cheryl, a vulnerable, uptight woman in her early forties who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat, unable to cry. Cheryl is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six; she also believes she has a profound connection with Phillip, a philandering board member at Open Palm, the women's self-defense studio where she has worked for twenty years. First there was a description of her analyst who reminded me of the hilarious Dr Tuttle in Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation: Everything she said made perfect sense but only for a few seconds The bona fides are stone-cold solid; why is it, then, that July’s work is so often called “whimsical”? The word feels unfair, a pejorative masquerading as a descriptor — possibly because the word “whimsy” comes from the noun “whim-wham,” meaning a trinket; possibly also because it carries a connotation of capriciousness. But when you apply the word to any kind of art, it implies that the art is decorative and incompletely thought-through. Not serious, by Jove! Also true: In literary fiction, male writers who use lightness and humor, who spin wildly in the space between one sentence and the next, who push against what’s expected, are described as “wry” or “satirical” or just plain “funny.” Women are bestowed a tiny, glittering bless-her-heart tiara of “whimsy.” Reflexive condescension absolves us from serious engagement. Miranda July is a woman, and a very serious writer who is also very funny. She’s challenging. Feed “whimsy” to the birds. Warner Archive released a blu-ray collection of 19 shorts in February 2020, followed by another in December. WB's ownership of Avery's work for MGM is ironic given that he left the former studio on bad terms in 1941. Since Somebody is brand new early adapters are integral to its creation — the most high-tech part of the app is not in the phone, it’s in the users who dare to deliver a message to stranger. “I see this as far-reaching public art project, inciting performance and conversation about the value of inefficiency and risk,” says July.This book was chosen for our book group. We were warned before we started this that we would either love it or hate it. Well, it has been a couple of months since we read it and I still find myself thinking about the book, which is usually a positive thing! The best that I can describe my feeling towards this book is that I enjoyed it but I didn’t like it. There are many brilliant scenes and it’s very similar in tone and feel to her previous movies, and the intermittently good short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007). It shares many of the same strengths and weaknesses. The story is similarly all over the place with strange ideas and quirks of human behaviour. You could complain that the story is implausible, but I don’t think she’s aiming for a real world logical effect. It’s set in its own little surreal world so complaints about character behaviour are mostly pointless.