Once, an old friend of mine co-wrote a shadow puppet opera and performed it in Denver. That same friend stood on stage at a club several January Firsts ago in nothing but a diaper as the New Year Baby. And more recently, he and some other artists created an exhibit out of spam emails and displayed it in a performance space in Manhattan.
The average person isn’t fascinated with the seemingly trivial the way he is. And the average person doesn’t go to such lengths to stage things this esoteric—unlike the characters in Miranda July’s short stories.
July (born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger) grew up in Berkeley, California, and is a video, performance and Web artist, as well as a playwright. She got the attention of moviegoers after the release Me and You and Everyone We Know, her 2005 feature debut, which she directed, wrote and starred in. It won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance and four prizes at Cannes including the Camera d’Or (for best first film).
Taking into account the writing in No One Belongs Here More Than You, her debut story collection, and the pale, bewildered-looking figure who stares out from under a mess of dark curls on the dust jacket, it’s a surprise to hear how unremarkable her voice sounds, how commonplace her outfit and how level-headed she comes across when interviewed.
The 16 stories in No One Belongs, are a highly unusual, often funny look at the functions and the fleeting nature that relationships of all kinds can have. Or, depending on the reader, they’re the bizarre by-product of someone who thinks way too much.
The relationships the stories revolve around exist between tenants, lovers, exes, friends and neighbors and, in “Making Love in 2003,” even novelist Madeleine L’Engle and a young writer who fantasizes about L’Engle’s husband. (A disclaimer promises that the things the L’Engles do in short story are entirely fictionalized). For the most part, the stories take place inside the heads of the narrators, with regular detours that follow the neurotic infrastructure of their thinking. They appear to be tangents, but zip back to the point just when it seems things are about to cross into total irrelevance. They’re closer to the kind of extensions of thoughts most people would not record the way July has. In “Mon Plaisir,” the narrator explains how she and her soon-to-be ex-lover have dismantled their relationship piece by piece as if it were self-assembly furniture: “And our few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled? Did some new couple in China do them? Were a Swedish man and woman foot to foot at this very moment?”
In “Ten True things,” the narrator describes her employer, a married accountant she’s having an affair with: “A better accountant might actually account for something instead of hiring another, slightly cheaper accountant to do the accounting, and skidding by on the difference … Accountants do this all the time, and so do Indian restaurants. Sag paneer? … the waiter hands the order to the cook, the cook hands it to the busboy, the busboy runs down the block and orders sag paneer from the other Indian restaurant, the shoddy one, takeout. This is why the more expensive restaurants take longer to bring out the food…In this case, I am the busboy, I am the one who hires the real accountant…”
To the characters in No One Belongs, and especially to the unnamed narrators—who you can safely equate with July herself—even the most accidental, tenuous encounters between people are relationships of some kind. Her characters are motivated by conflicting desires and aversions, their attitudes and intentions are constantly in flux.
I find the best way to read a short story collection by a single author is intermittently, by leaving a good collection lying around and reading one or two stories, and then putting it back down on, in my case, the floor. There may be some authors who are able to write in a multitude of voices that change from story to story, however, read straight through, No One Belongs starts to sound like a disjointed novella told by very similar-sounding narrators. It’s partially because everything is told in the first person, which can become redundant. Though in all fairness, half of the stories in the book appeared on their own in literary magazines like Tin House, Zoetrope and The Paris Review, before they were collected here.
The upside of No One Belongs Here More Than You is that Miranda July emerges loud and clear as a fresh, original voice, that will probably be back soon (with a novel, perhaps?). And we can all rest assured, whatever shape or form it appears, it will be an unusual (and good) thing.
The average person isn’t fascinated with the seemingly trivial the way he is. And the average person doesn’t go to such lengths to stage things this esoteric—unlike the characters in Miranda July’s short stories.
July (born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger) grew up in Berkeley, California, and is a video, performance and Web artist, as well as a playwright. She got the attention of moviegoers after the release Me and You and Everyone We Know, her 2005 feature debut, which she directed, wrote and starred in. It won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance and four prizes at Cannes including the Camera d’Or (for best first film).
Taking into account the writing in No One Belongs Here More Than You, her debut story collection, and the pale, bewildered-looking figure who stares out from under a mess of dark curls on the dust jacket, it’s a surprise to hear how unremarkable her voice sounds, how commonplace her outfit and how level-headed she comes across when interviewed.
The 16 stories in No One Belongs, are a highly unusual, often funny look at the functions and the fleeting nature that relationships of all kinds can have. Or, depending on the reader, they’re the bizarre by-product of someone who thinks way too much.
The relationships the stories revolve around exist between tenants, lovers, exes, friends and neighbors and, in “Making Love in 2003,” even novelist Madeleine L’Engle and a young writer who fantasizes about L’Engle’s husband. (A disclaimer promises that the things the L’Engles do in short story are entirely fictionalized). For the most part, the stories take place inside the heads of the narrators, with regular detours that follow the neurotic infrastructure of their thinking. They appear to be tangents, but zip back to the point just when it seems things are about to cross into total irrelevance. They’re closer to the kind of extensions of thoughts most people would not record the way July has. In “Mon Plaisir,” the narrator explains how she and her soon-to-be ex-lover have dismantled their relationship piece by piece as if it were self-assembly furniture: “And our few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled? Did some new couple in China do them? Were a Swedish man and woman foot to foot at this very moment?”
In “Ten True things,” the narrator describes her employer, a married accountant she’s having an affair with: “A better accountant might actually account for something instead of hiring another, slightly cheaper accountant to do the accounting, and skidding by on the difference … Accountants do this all the time, and so do Indian restaurants. Sag paneer? … the waiter hands the order to the cook, the cook hands it to the busboy, the busboy runs down the block and orders sag paneer from the other Indian restaurant, the shoddy one, takeout. This is why the more expensive restaurants take longer to bring out the food…In this case, I am the busboy, I am the one who hires the real accountant…”
To the characters in No One Belongs, and especially to the unnamed narrators—who you can safely equate with July herself—even the most accidental, tenuous encounters between people are relationships of some kind. Her characters are motivated by conflicting desires and aversions, their attitudes and intentions are constantly in flux.
I find the best way to read a short story collection by a single author is intermittently, by leaving a good collection lying around and reading one or two stories, and then putting it back down on, in my case, the floor. There may be some authors who are able to write in a multitude of voices that change from story to story, however, read straight through, No One Belongs starts to sound like a disjointed novella told by very similar-sounding narrators. It’s partially because everything is told in the first person, which can become redundant. Though in all fairness, half of the stories in the book appeared on their own in literary magazines like Tin House, Zoetrope and The Paris Review, before they were collected here.
The upside of No One Belongs Here More Than You is that Miranda July emerges loud and clear as a fresh, original voice, that will probably be back soon (with a novel, perhaps?). And we can all rest assured, whatever shape or form it appears, it will be an unusual (and good) thing.
