The Anatomy Lesson: Miranda July Channels Her Inner Roth In Debut Novel — artnews.com

For all the different masks she wears—director, screenwriter, actor, artist, short-story writer, and, with the publication this month of The First Bad Man (Scribner), novelist—there are really only two Miranda Julys, and they don’t seem to get along with each other. In her first film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), the theme of over-sexed children, milked for the sake of humor and not always unsuccessfully, is buffered by moments such as a character, played by July, grieving over the death of a stranger’s goldfish. In The Future (2011), her most recent film, a grim affair erupts out of a subplot about the adoption of a sickly cat named Paw-Paw, who also narrates the film. These two halves—the disturbed and the banal—more or less fuse together, with minimal accomplishment, in The First Bad Man, which, if nothing else, is perhaps the most sexually frustrated American novel since Portnoy’s Complaint.

Read More