The First Bad Man: Miranda July’s screwball stance takes some beating

MIRANDA July’s The First Bad Man is a novel that starts out crazily and ends up, well, no less crazy.

Short story writer and first-time novelist Miranda July.

MIRANDA July’s The First Bad Man is a novel that starts out crazily and ends up, well, no less crazy, even though its later chapters register a profound modulation in tone. The first kind is manic, hilarious, absurd, brutal: contemporary American reality played as slapstick in a manner that will be wholly familiar to readers of Lorrie Moore, AM Homes, George Saunders, Wells Tower and so on.

The second kind accommodates the first but employs a richer palette. It acknowledges that the world is mad, that others are mad, that we ourselves are mad.

Yet this sense that, yes, collective insanity is an accurate reflection of the way things are — the lucidity of our acceptance of this fact — represents a paradoxical form of sanity, and surely the only kind worth having.

Cheryl Glickman is 42, blandly androgynous in appearance and a borderline obsessive compulsive. Her days are spent managing a Californian non-profit called Open Palm that sells female self-defence DVDs as workout mat­erial. She lives alone, eats exclusively from a single saucepan and suffers from globus hystericus: basically, a lump in the throat that may be real or imagined.

The malady is apt: Cheryl strikes the reader as someone who has spent a lifetime swallowing unhappiness.

As we watch her navigate lonely days, note the cheery contempt of her colleagues, witness her unrequited passion for an older, rich and deeply selfish Open Palm board member named Phillip Bettelheim, her brittleness and emotional occlusion seem a given. What saves her is hyper-awareness of her ridiculous ­situation.

Indeed there is a dark, cracked humour in her passive-aggressive stance, which is deliv­ered as a screwball comedy-type interior ­harangue:

A man grabs your breast — what do you do? A gang of men surrounds you and knocks you to the ground, then begins unzipping your pants — what do you do? A man you thought you knew presses you against a wall and won’t let you go — what do you do? A man yells a crude comment about a part of your body he’d like you to show him — do you show it to him? No. You turn and look straight at him, point your finger right at his nose, and, drawing from your diaphragm, you make a very loud, guttural “Aiaiaiaiaiai!” noise. The students always liked that part, making that noise.

Soon Cheryl is saddled with an unwanted houseguest named Clee — the difficult daughter of another pair of board members who has come to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career — and her odd solitary ways are suddenly exposed to another’s view. Unfortunately for Cheryl this 20-something blonde, built along Amazonian lines, is an unsavoury and deeply unsympathetic interloper.

In short order Clee destroys all the domestic systems that Cheryl has placed between herself and pure chaos. She spends her days lying on the sofa watching TV, surrounded by soft drink cans and instant noodles, a remote in one hand and a smartphone in the other. She bathes only intermittently, and she treats a stricken Cheryl with overt mockery and barely concealed ­malice.

What happens next is so strange and logic-defying that it makes the reader gasp: Clee begins physical attacks on Cheryl, who is obliged to draw on years of self-defence training to defend herself. However, the encounters are not distressing so much as liberating:

When we started up again my skin was tender; bruises were already forming, and every muscle was shaking. It was nice, deeper and more focused. I felt my face contorting with a wrath I didn’t recognise; it seemed out of scale for my species. This was the opposite of getting mugged. I’d been mugged every day of my life and this was the first day I wasn’t mugged.

And then, not so much liberating as frankly erotic:

I lay next to my bed, sucking down big pulls of air. Long loose thrums of pain were gently vibrating through my limbs. It was gone. Not just my globus but the whole structure around it, the tightness in my chest, my locked jaw. I rolled my head from side to side. Exquisite. A million tiny, delicate sensations. The skin was burning from something she had done but otherwise loose as a goose.

‘‘The beautiful is always bizarre,’’ claimed Baudelaire. And while the comic tone never falters, and while the oddity attached to their domestic situation continues to mount, what happens between Clee and Cheryl is plaintively sweet. Though it helps that the evolving transgressions on which their relationship is based are balanced against those involving the 65-year-old Bettelheim and an even more unsuitable mate.

This is not a fiction about deviation from sexual norms, however; more a story about the unlikely sources of love. Cheryl is not released from her solitude by the events that follow. She does, however, come to be ennobled by her ordinary human suffering instead of being bound by it:

I appreciated nuns now, not the conscripted kind, but modern women who chose it. If you were wise enough to know that this life would mostly consist of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have.

All of which makes this very funny and incorrigibly antic novel sound sad and serious — which it is too. Much like the career of its author July, a celebrated short-story writer and filmmaker, The First Bad Man is assembled from multiple parts: the miracle is that they mesh. On the evidence of her novelistic debut, July is that rare creature who can, as philosopher Edwin Irwin said of Dorothy Parker, ‘‘combine a heartbreak with a wisecrack’’.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

The First Bad Man

By Miranda July

Allen & Unwin, 288pp, $27.99