No One Belongs Here More Than You

Miranda July’s debut collection is an engaging mix of the heartfelt and self-aware, with some very funny moments and sharp observations.

Successfully combining vaguely surreal settings with quirky but recognisably realistic character types, and infused with enough charm and humour to offset any intimations of bleakness and cynicism, it’s an enjoyable blend.

It’s also an accomplishment made more impressive by the potential obstacle of her cast of characters, who are, frankly, best described as needy, insecure and desperate. Too quick to throw some relationships away and too slow to let go of others, and frequently comforting themselves with the kind of overused secondhand therapy-speak that substitutes buzzwords for actual self-examination, it could be a tricky task to make them sympathetic and even likeable, but July manages it.

In her hands their dreams are less pathetic than touchingly human, and what could be the height of aggravating self-delusion is undercut by a knowing, but gentle, sense of the ridiculous. Fantasising about the life she wishes she could have, the narrator of ‘The Man on the Stairs’ lists ‘the three main things that make [her] a drag (‘I never return phone calls. I am falsely modest. I have a disproportionate amount of guilt about these two things, which makes me unpleasant to be around’).

This particular character shares with the others an overwhelming sense of being an outsider, of having somehow lost in life without quite understanding why. What gives the collection a poignant edge is that the sense of arbitrariness isn’t dispelled – so, in ‘Mon Plaisir’, one couple’s relationship flickers back into life in the background of a film set, but then breaks down for good as the director yells cut; while in ‘Birthmark’ another’s is saved by an exploding jar of jam. There isn’t a great deal of evidence to suggest why things should turn out so differently in either story, except for the baffling inconsistencies of human behaviour and the capricious nature of fate.

Coursing through each story is the tension between this sense of randomly allocated joy, and the powerful yearning for fulfilment. It’s a tension that eases only occasionally, but it makes for some of the more bizarre as well as the more affecting moments in the collection, as when a lonely secretary stalks her employer’s wife, but is eventually rewarded with a moment of recognition: ‘There was no apology in her eyes, no love or caring. But she saw me, I existed, and this lifted the beams off my shoulders’. It’s easy enough to laugh at, and sometimes with, July’s parade of the peculiar and pitiful, but also remain sympathetic to their search to prove the title true.