All Fours is a Western in Disguise

Or, colonization without consequence.

There was no book more popular or zeitgeisty this summer than All Fours. It was everywhere, and when it wasn’t physically present, it was being discussed in reverent, horny tones. The general consensus was that it was inspired in its centering of female desire and openly discussing perimenopause on the page. Women felt seen. In one Goodreads review, someone said July’s work made her feel like she’s allowed to exist. In another, a reader spoke about how much they identified with the main character. It then went on to be shortlisted for the National Book Award. This kind of effusive praise, both critical and popular, made me curious. It had been a while since white women (and society writ large) had elected a literary leader. Not since Sally Rooney have I seen this kind of visceral, full-throated endorsement. I had some sense that upon reading I would find a white woman behaving badly. I read the book quickly. There’s something seductive about the prose and the raw way she talks about life, love, aging and sex. But beneath the clear-eyed observations, visceral details and a seemingly unhinged main character, is a Western with a manifest destiny plot where the main character is rewarded for dominating the land and its inhabitants.

Westerns are ultimately morality dramas, where good versus evil and man versus nature are continuously interrogated, offering up an alternative social and moral framework. July recreates this on a smaller scale, following a main character who sets out on a journey in search of her authentic self and ventures into the “wilderness,” to find it. In our late capitalist society, the wilderness is our psyches—a vast, dark, complex space where there’s endless work to be done in the pursuit of self-discovery. Novels like All Fours center this conflict, allowing the average woman, who grew up in a world where she might have been shamed or dismissed for her desire or is grappling with her relationship to it as she ages, to look at the recklessness of the narrator as freeing or inspiring—a peek into the life she might have if she were brave enough to leap. But the freedom that she seeks is freedom from rules, the epitome of manifest destiny. She doesn’t want to operate in a society with rights and wrongs. She wants everything she desires to be the right choice.

The protagonist views her life as painfully domestic and heteronormative, her participation in it a performance that requires her to conceal her true self. She is stifled by her multi-million dollar house that she didn’t decorate, her serviceable husband Harris whom she tolerates and the monotony and anxiety of caring for her child. She views this performance as necessary, that exposing her true self would result in rejection from her husband and maybe even threaten the life she’s built, though she doesn't view it as entirely hers. This is evidenced by her continued emphasis on her home as belonging to her husband, noting that she didn’t decorate it. She even goes so far as to sneak into said house after a long hangout with her best friend—the only place she can “be herself”—something she says Harris would never consider doing. He presumably feels comfortable in their life and doesn’t question his sense of ownership and belonging. This characterization operates two-fold. On one level, it captures the essence of the protagonist. She’s self conscious, a bit insecure. On another, it charts the value system of the novel and illuminates her position within the household. Psychologically, she places her husband above her, evidenced by his freedom of movement, while she is his subordinate, “forced” to sneak around. It is important to note that this subjugation is entirely self-imposed, a social contract invented by July’s character and maintained by her too. By framing home as a site of subjugation and concealment, and “not home”—in the car, in her best friend’s garage—as synonymous with freedom and the true self, we are invited to sympathize with the choices she makes in the name of self-discovery. 

We later learn that this self-discovery hinges on domination and controlling her environment and the people within it. Soon after we meet the protagonist she decides to go on a cross-country road trip to prove to herself and Harris that she’s the kind of person who can be happy with simply existing and find joy in the small moments of life. She never makes it. Instead she ends up living in a motel room 30 minutes away and having an unconsummated and totalizing affair with a man who washed her windows. As opposed to the frontier or a Native American village, the narrator’s wilderness is a motel room in Monrovia, which she decides to renovate over the course of a few days, modeling it after a hotel she’d stayed in in France. The French are notorious for their colonization, and to export these values to a motel room and deem them positive or the pinnacle of taste is telling. To do this she enlists the help of Claire, a local woman whose skill set she is constantly impressed by given her perception of Claire as provincial. When she is questioned about her choices and told she is violating her guest agreement, she brushes this aside. She doesn’t consider her destruction of property to be problematic, if anything she sees it as an inherent improvement. This choice is glossed over, the protest lasting no more than a few lines because she considers this room and this place to be a blank canvas, a space she is allowed to exert her will over because Harris (domesticity, prison, authority, constraint) isn’t there to stop her. This part of the novel is framed by readers as sort of absurd, a quirky, kooky homage to Virginia Woolf’s Room of One’s Own. But if we understand the protagonist as exerting control over an environment she views as hers for the taking, not dissimilar to early settlers, it becomes something else—an example of her belief that her authority supersedes the native people living there and the environment. The lack of consequence in the novel—a net positive because the motel can charge more for the room— is also tacit acceptance of this action. July, the master of the novel’s universe, rewards the narrator’s domination by making this room take on a magical womblike quality where she is renewed. It’s as if the room was waiting for her this whole time. As if it’s her destiny.

This space becomes the main location of her affair with Claire’s husband, Davey. She is activated by him in ways we don’t see elsewhere in the novel, it’s as if he drives her crazy. This carnal desire has been polarizing for readers. Some find it grotesque, others erotic, but I’ve yet to see a discussion about the politics of this desire—the inherent power imbalance, the fetishization, and the use of blackness as a proxy for exoticism. In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison assesses the function of blackness in work written by white writers for white audiences, noting that the “fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive, an extraordinary mediation on the self; powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious,” (17). In All Fours this is on full display. 

Davey is “native,” to Monrovia, significantly younger than her, comes from a lower social class and dreams of becoming a professional hip hop dancer. By any metric he is framed as the “other.” The exotic is the nexus of the erotic. Her descriptions of their encounters are rife with images of blackness and darkness, associating it with the base, animalistic self and transformation. When she gets ready to meet him, for example, she wears a dress “suitable for a safari in the 1930s,” as if she’s stepping out into a sort of jungle (89). When she thinks of Davey jerking off while thinking of her, she misses the “black rubber dick,” she has at home. Davey’s choice of medium, hip hop dance, is significant too. When he dances for the first time, he does so in the dark, and at the end of his routine, she feels transformed. On page 113, they dance together for the first time, and the narrator describes his moves as animalistic. His arms, “dangle like a monkey’s,” and she is delighted, like someone who has witnessed a hip hop dance group in Times Square for the first time. On page 122, she dances with him and in embodying his freedom, her butt “swelled up like those red monkey asses,” and she “[mates] with the air, pumping it.” She likens dancing with him to being on drugs, and when he finishes she notes that he is a “really good hip hop dancer,” with a “strong tireless body that wouldn’t quit.” Race and gender are twinned here. In addition to the racialized descriptions of his dancing and body, there’s a moment when she describes him as taking on a feminine quality, becoming “busty and cunty,” such is the flexibility of his identity, such is the vastness of the wilderness for her to wrangle and control and lose herself. 

While Davey activates her she does not love him in the same way someone loves their equal. She sees their affair as an “elaborate Victorian game,” that allows her access to a version of herself that is locked away when she is home. Ultimately, Davey is of little consequence. At the end of a visit, she meditates on her feelings toward him:

It was chilling that some part of me was unmoved by Davey, but it seemed to indicate that there was a core self in there; someone was leaving the light on for me should I ever have to retrace my steps and find my way back. In the meantime I could push deeper into the woods without worry of getting lost (123). 

This observation reinforces the imagery of light and dark. The light brings her back to herself and the safety of her life, while the darkness and wilderness, the primary terrain of their relationship, is an opportunity to release and explore her desire. It’s a reminder that the narrator is in control of herself and the environment, and that any claims toward the contrary functions as absolvement. This false danger is a continuous theme in the novel—where the narrator does things that in a real-world setting would result in a consequence, but in the novel becomes the best thing for everyone involved, even supported. 

There’s no rules about novels adhering to reality and many treat this book as if it operates just outside of it. But what emerges is a different moral code and logic that’s worth examining. In the logic of the novel, anything that serves the character’s self development equals good (her affair with Davey, the renovation), evidenced by the result. When she and Davey finally end, she thinks of herself as his hero, that the money she paid Claire for the renovation would be the impetus for them to move and be a springboard for his hip hop dancing career. And she’s right, that is what happens. Instead she is the one who has to grapple with her own mental anguish and a vague sense of guilt. No one immediately affected by the affair—Claire, Davey—are angry with her or attempt to hold her accountable because they don’t have the agency to do so. They are not her equals, and so they fade into the background, like the ornamentation they’ve always been. As she drives away from the motel at the end of part one, a cleaning woman, who happens to be Claire’s aunt by marriage, yells out to her that she doesn’t regret her choices in life, which the narrator deduces means cheating on Claire’s uncle. This woman, who never really speaks otherwise, uses this random moment to assuage the narrator’s guilt, like the universe telling her she’s on the right track. Immediately prior, Skip is trying to rent out the renovated room as a “new suite,” to a visiting couple, furthering the notion that by swooping in the narrator has managed to simultaneously improve herself and her environment. When she finally returns home she grapples with the affair privately and the consequences are largely personal, centered around her spiraling about missing Davey and feeling disconnected from her “real” life now that she’s experienced something else. It furthers the idea that this town a mere 30 minutes away is a fantasy, one that begins and ends with her presence. The novel is much closer to Westworld than Woolf, an elaborate game where you can choose your own adventure and fuck and kill with impunity because it all resets at the end. This is the crux of the manifest destiny novel, that all of the killing and maiming and clearing, is justifiable if it serves the ultimate goal of bending the universe to your will. 

Right before reading All Fours I came across a TIkTok by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago about landscape paintings. In the video, the artist Andrea Carlson argues that despite their appearance these paintings are historically about possession of the land and the violence of displacement. These idyllic, vast, sun-dappled scenes beg the question, how did the land get emptied? The paintings never answer. Instead they are bought and sold at Sotheby’s and hung in hotels and wood-paneled rooms. The cover of the novel features a painting just like that, grabbing a cliff from Albert Bierstadt’s “Sunset in the Rockies”. There are no people or animals to be found. Just a cliff and swaths of golden light. The cover could not be more fitting.