No One Belongs Here More Than You

A professional disclaimer: I finished this book over a week ago and kept putting off a review. In the meantime, the relationship between Me and It has grown thin, the equivalent of an occasion-based friendship, I suppose, which is why I’ll rely heavily on samples. Though, in this case, I think it might prove to be for the better anyway.

         Like “Me You and Everyone We Know,” a Caméra d'Or winning film starring and written by Miranda July, her debut collection of short fiction searches for connection in the most offbeat places. The subject matter within “No One Belongs Here More Than You” (Scribner, 2007) ranges from a geriatric swim class without a pool to a virgin’s desperate slide into the world of peepshows. July is a quirky author who manages to avoid being trite, a rare feat.
         The stories are unified by a confident voice, a voice perhaps defined by an innocence of language, an honest language. Her narrative psyche is consistent and interesting enough to hold attention through sixteen stories, most of which are complete and satisfying. Her pedestrian diction is rolling and easy, it allows for a certain comfort in the absurd. What follows is the opening of a story entitled ‘It Was Romance.’ “This is how we are different from other animals, she said. But keep your eyes open so you can see the cloth. We all had white cloth napkins over our faces, and the light glowed through them. It seemed brighter under there, as if the cloth actually filtered out the darkness that was in the rest of the room—the dark rays that come off things and people. The instructor walked around as she talked so that she was everywhere at once. Her face and permed hair were forgotten; there was just the voice and the white light, and these two things combined felt like the truth.”
         July recognizes her characters’ philosophical limits as well as her own as a writer. In ‘Making Love in 2003,’ a story featuring Madeleine L’Engle which feels as if culled from actual experience, she flirts with existentialism. “How does anyone ever let go of anything? My book was a long glove clasping the dark shape I had loved. Inside the glove was one very pale young hand that had never learned to grip skin. It was so raw it looked wet. I fell into the eyes of every person I passed on the street. Food seemed impossibly strange. Children thought I was a child and tried to play with me, but I could neither play nor work, I could only wonder why. Why do people live at all?”
         There is an aesthetic distance to these stories—we recognize them as art. Although her style is convincing, we rarely completely identify with these characters and situations, which is fine. A widespread discussion in the field of literature is whether a work should be judged based on what it is or what it does. This collection succeeds on both levels, but the former more so. Despite an almost constant sense of voyeurism, the reader is taken by the hand and introduced to July’s world of cringe-inducing encounters and frank sentiment. Though, there are flashes of familiarity, particularly in private thought, which give the characters flesh. I offer an example from the story ‘The Sister,’ in which a lonely man anxiously awaits his first meeting with a possible love. “The bar was full of smoke and men, but I could see her, behind someone, just out of view, in tight jeans and tennis shoes, chewing gum, with pierced ears and some kind of band holding her hair back. A ribbon or some kind of plastic band. And pierced ears. I said that already.” Her use of repetition and immediate, embarrassed correction emphasizes the elderly man’s anticipation. Again, within the same story, the repetitive technique is utilized, but this time to a lesser degree. “I had never been in love, I had been a peaceful man, but now I was caught in agitation. I accidently hurt myself with my own body, as if I were two clumsy people fighting. I held on to some things too tightly, ripping pages as I turned them, and let go of other things too suddenly, plates, breaking them. Victor sat with me at lunch all week and tried to interest me in things that were not interesting.” This isn’t the first time the narrator has mentioned that he had never before been in love, and July continues to convey the man’s fixation on this mysterious woman through his disinterest in anything else.
         These vignettes run the gamut of identity. There is light in the book (the common language certainly does something to soften the often harsh blows), but lonesomeness and abstracted characters predominantly fill the collection. The quite brief ‘This Person’ opens with a description of a “somebody somewhere” and quickly sharpens to an individual point, until, after only three pages and a few lines, the reader is suffocated by intimate knowledge of the subject. “This person mourns the fact that she has ruined her one chance to be loved by everyone; as this person climbs into bed, the weight of this tragedy seems to bear down upon this person’s chest. And it is a comforting weight, almost human in heft.”
         This collection won’t bowl you over, July isn’t quite Flannery O’Connor. On occasion she loses her edge and it becomes evident that she is trying to create art by way of the irreverent, an exercise which begs for the cry of pretentious. But most of the time July is funny and penetrating. She can be both heartbreaking and inspiring. In his bit of praise printed on the inside cover of the paperback edition, George Saunders coined the phrase ‘July-esque,’ which seems entirely appropriate, as there are sure to be imitators.