Nobody writes a conception scene like Miranda July. In “The First Bad Man,” the debut novel by the ambi-talented writer, director and artist, a woman reads aloud from a website called “Grobaby.com” and sympathizes with the baby-to-be: “I could see it so clearly, the zygote — shiny and bulbous, filled with the electric memory of being two but now damned with the eternal loneliness of being just one. The sorrow that never goes away.”
Loneliness is July’s religion, and transcending it her art. Her offbeat characters are solitary dots on a very quirky graph, yearning to become part of something parabolic. In her 2007 short story collection “No One Belongs Here More Than You” and performance-art/publishing hybrids like 2011’s “It Chooses You,” they sometimes feel like they need a little air; so it’s good to see July stretch her legs. In “The First Bad Man,” as in her most recent film, a fussy opening scenario has time to unfold like an origami fortune-teller, revealing emotional landscapes that are satisfyingly complex, if slightly wrinkled.
The narrator in “The First Bad Man” is Cheryl Glickman, an androgynous, socially awkward woman in her 40s. Obsessive-compulsive and terminally repressed, Cheryl lives by her “systems.” There’s a system for the dishes and a system for putting away bath towels, a system for reaching orgasm and a system for swallowing food when her globus hystericus is acting up — that’s a lump in the throat, in hypochondriac-ese, which Cheryl speaks fluently. Most importantly of all, there’s a system for convincing herself that she’s not utterly alone on the planet, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Cheryl keeps herself going with baroque fantasies that would embarrass Walter Mitty, some of them grotesquely banal, others straight out of D. W. Griffiths’ “Intolerance.” Cheryl believes, for instance, that she and Phillip, a graying lothario on the board of the self-defense studio where she works, have been making love to each other’s incarnations across the sweep of centuries — they just haven’t gotten around to it yet in this life. She also believes in her daily encounters with the soul of a baby who is being reborn again and again in an effort to be near her. We first meet Cheryl playing out one of her autoerotic daydreams: “I drove to the doctor’s office as if I was starring in a movie Phillip was watching.” The doctor is a quack, a “chromotherapist” who hands out colors to treat psychosomatic illnesses; but then, Cheryl’s whole sense of self is based on lies.
At any rate, it’s not the chromotherapist who will change her life, but Clee, a thuggish, gum-snapping young woman foisted on Cheryl by Clee’s despairing parents — who happen to be Cheryl’s employers. It’s obvious from the get-go that Clee is going to play the bull in Cheryl’s neurotic china shop, but when it happens, it’s darker and more delicious than anything you’d expect. As Clee’s outsized id punches through the novel’s static mannerisms, the plot grows stickier and nastier, until finally it erupts, startlingly, into tenderness.
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It all works because of the clear-eyed gentleness with which July handles her abject narrator. Cheryl maintains a stubborn self-regard that defends her from the hostility and revulsion she inspires in others — even as the chromotherapist scribbles rosacea on a medical diagram of her face, ferociously “stabbing a piece of paper with a red pen,” she finds comfort in her perfect ears, “darling little shells.” She is an expert at ignoring the passive-aggressive jostling of her colleagues, clinging to her employers’ most backhanded praise and stodgily enduring all things in the belief that she is unique and special rather than stunted and inappropriate. This cultivated lack of self-awareness protects her from others’ callousness, but also from her own capacity to hurt people. Like any effective self-defense strategy, it wounds indiscriminately. Yet July makes a case for the importance of such strategies in protecting the seeds of real dignity until they are ready to grow.
And, of course, self-defense is an explicit theme. The office where Cheryl works one day a week is a former women’s self-defense dojo that has turned to the more profitable fitness market, thanks to Cheryl’s gift for sublimation. When her aggression finally erupts, thanks to Clee’s brutish bullying, the book becomes a story about surviving your own survival techniques, almost a manual for loving one’s self, lumps, rosacea and all. Faced with impending change, Cheryl wonders, “Was I like honey thinking it’s a small bear, not realizing the bear is just the shape of its bottle?” It’s a compelling metaphor for what’s sweetest and scariest about our innermost selves.
Amy Gentry is a writer living in Austin, Texas. She has a doctorate degree in English and writes a weekly style column called The Good Eye.
“The First Bad Man”
By Miranda July, Scribner, 279 pages, $25