THE FIRST BAD MAN

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Summary:

From the acclaimed filmmaker, artist, and bestselling author of No One Belongs Here More Than You, a spectacular debut novel that is so heartbreaking, so dirty, so tender, so funny--so Miranda July--readers will be blown away.

Here is Cheryl, a tightly-wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat. She is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other people's babies. Cheryl is also obsessed with Phillip, a philandering board member at the women's self-defense non-profit where she works. She believes they've been making love for many lifetimes, though they have yet to consummate in this one.

When Cheryl's bosses ask if their twenty-one-year-old daughter Clee can move into her house for a little while, Cheryl's eccentrically-ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee--the selfish, cruel blond bombshell--who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, provides her the love of a lifetime.

Tender, gripping, slyly hilarious, infused with raging sexual fantasies and fierce maternal love, Miranda July's first novel confirms her as a spectacularly original, iconic and important voice today, and a writer for all time. The First Bad Man is dazzling, disorienting, and unforgettable.

My Review:

The book summary is correct. The story is tender and gripping, it is slyly hilarious but also ridiculous at times. The sexual fantasies are over-the-top raging though probably better than 50 Shades of Grey, which I have not read; will not read. The maternal love is fierce and was my favorite aspect of the story.

I actually enjoyed reading all of it though I can't think of anyone I know to whom I could recommend it. Possibly if Anne Tyler were putting out her first novel in 2015, she could have gone this way.

Margaret Atwood recently said in an interview that these are not the times to write realistic fiction (paraphrase) and explained in another interview that she meant stories about middle class life, family stories about love and relationships. Miranda July appears to have a similar viewpoint.

Most of the people in my extended family are fairly regular. So are the members of my reading groups. The people in this novel are quite whacked and far from regular. They have the usual human wants and dreams with an inability to get them.

But there are ever widening fissures in the lives of these regular people I know and the standard human pattern (if there ever were such a thing) is undergoing cataclysmic change, so I think reading these books like Miranda July's, being written by GenXers, GenYers, and Millennials, are perhaps the best way to get a glimpse of what is going on. Speculative fiction is the new realistic novel!

(The First Bad Man is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)