No One Belongs Here More Than You (Miranda July)

October 8, 2008 at 2:49 pm (Writing Communities) (book, book review, frank o'connor award, loneliness, lorrie moore, love, miranda july, no one belongs here more than you, sex, short stories)

…he made jokes, ridiculous jokes, in the car on the way back to my apartment. I steeled myself against laughter; I would rather die than laugh. I didn’t laugh, I did not laugh. But I died, I did die. (“The Man on the Stairs”)

***

In the introduction to his 1985 novel, Skeleton Crew, Stephen King writes that “a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.” If that’s true, then Miranda July’s first collection of short fiction, entitled No One Belongs Here More Than You (Scribner/Simon & Schuster 2007), is a full-on makeout session where each “kiss” leaves you with a strange, yet not necessarily unpleasant, aftertaste.

The first story in the collection holds nothing back, giving an honest dose of what to expect in the coming tales. In “The Shared Patio,” we are presented with a lonely narrator and the people to whom this narrator feels the closest, even if this “closeness” is imagined. When a tenant of the apartment below begins seizing on their porch, the narrator calmly rests her head on his shoulder and dreams of him telling her how perfect she is: “It’s in each thing that you do,” he tells her. “I watch you when you hang your bottom over the side of the bathtub to wash it before bed. … From now on I am yours.”

Of course, the man’s wife is none-too-happy when she comes home to find her husband in a near-catatonic state with the neighbor cuddled-up cozy. But that’s just how it is in July’s stories: Reality, or the world outside the narrator, often holds little importance.

Threads of loneliness, distance, and – above all – the ongoing struggle between sex and love run through each story in this collection. July’s characters desperately want to belong, and to connect. Doesn’t everyone? However, while these characters in July’s collection have the common human condition of continuously wanting, they go about achieving their desires in peculiar ways.

Readers can see the characters’ near insanity as they move toward and distance themselves from loving relationships, yet the characters almost always dismiss their bizarre actions as perfectly acceptable. A special-needs teacher, for example, qualifies her relationship with a 14-year-old autistic boy by her firm belief he is the reincarnation of the energy burst that repeatedly had its way with her in high school. A woman obsesses over Prince William and dreams of enticing him to nuzzle her breasts in an English bar. An apartment tenant rests her head on a seizing man’s shoulder and takes a quiet, intimate nap rather than call for help.

July has a way of making her readers feel as if they are the odd-men-out, rather than the eccentric people populating her fiction. But, when taken with a grain of salt and a suspension of moral reality, these stories actually reinforce what so many want desperately to believe: It is our birthright, as human, to love and be loved. Does it truly matter how this birthright is claimed? July takes this question into her own hands and has come out with a cryptic, sexy, intriguing answer that leaves us stunned, yet perhaps still in the dark.