No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories
Issue #32
By Miranda July (Scribner, 224 pages, $23)
By Eugenia Williamson
Published: June 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
“We had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.” So says the narrator of “It Was Romance,” one of the more compelling stories in Miranda July’s debut short-story collection
This yearning manifests itself in the characters’ patently futile sexual longings for wildly inappropriate objects. Consider the narrator of “The Sister,” an elderly man who inspects grommets in a purse factory and masturbates to thoughts of phantom pubescent girls; or the narrator of “Majesty,” a middle-aged woman who works for an earthquake-preparedness NPO and has erotic dreams about Prince William. Like other stories in this collection, both focus on a time in the characters’ lives when the extremity of their desire threatens to propel their fantasies into reality. Both end with a sexual connection that defies the narrators’ original intentions and the readers’ expectations.
July has graduated from the George Saunders School of Idiosyncratic First-Person Narrators, but her coy comma usage and focus on continent-sized chinks in her characters’ self-awareness never lapses into preciousness. Instead, July presents an endearingly quirky collection that’s as funny as it is unsettling. The stories propel the reader into the strange spaces of their narrators’ mental states, with glittering, enigmatic phrases as sign posts along the way: “I was experiencing a paroxysm of selfhood. The scientific name for this spasm is the Last Hurrah.”
In July’s hands, this sounds like gospel. Hurrah, indeed.
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