The first bad man

Review by New York Times Review

CHERYL GLICKMAN HAS a psychosomatic lump in her throat that sometimes prevents her from swallowing. She also has a burning crush on a man named Phillip Bettelheim who wants her blessing before he consummates his love for an underage girl, and a karmic connection with a child she calls Kubelko Bondy, whose spirit continually appears to her in other people's babies. Cheryl is the protagonist of Miranda July's very funny debut novel, "The First Bad Man," and she's such an acute observer that her life is never as pathetic to the reader as it appears to the people around her. She has developed systems for everything, including a rigid housekeeping asceticism that helps her stave off the kind of debilitating sadness that, if left unchecked, can snowball from letting dirty dishes pile up in the sink to eating off said dirty dishes, to no longer bathing, to urinating in cups because they're closer to the bed. Her ideal is unruffled contentment. When things really flow, she says, "my days become dreamlike, no edges anywhere, none of the snags and snafus that life is so famous for. After days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can't even feel myself anymore, it's as if I don't exist." For 25 years, Cheryl has been a manager at Open Palm, a women's self-defense studio turned "self-defense as exercise" video purveyor; her careful systems are deranged when her passive-aggressive bosses force Cheryl to take on their 20-year-old daughter, Clee, as a houseguest. Clee is "so much a woman," Cheryl tells us when they meet, "that for a moment I wasn't sure what I was." Clee is sexy, with "a blond, tan largeness of scale" as well as eye-watering foot stench. She is, it turns out, a terrible guest. Her manners are egregious, she's a layabout boor and she calls herself a misogynist. Cheryl's meekness and sad appearance incense Clee to the point that she begins to beat Cheryl up. This is where the until-then affable novel exploded my expectations and became unlike anything else I've read. The abuse becomes consensual when Cheryl learns how to fight back, and then it becomes erotic. July is exceptional at tracing the imaginative contours of sexuality, and Cheryl's awakening, though sparked by physicality, becomes most frenzied in her head. Because the vocabulary for what she's imagining reverts repeatedly to the words she's learned from Phil Bettelheim's lewd text messages, it's also hilarious. It feels important to note here that Miranda July has had impressive success in other fields: She has written, directed and starred in two films, the first of which, "Me and You and Everyone We Know," won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes and the Special Jury prize at Sundance; her multimedia and performance art are in museum collections and have been presented in two Whitney Biennials; she has developed an app called Somebody that's both art project and inversion of social media, as it asks actual human strangers to deliver messages in the flesh. Her first book, the collection "No One Belongs Here More Than You," won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, which, in the relatively small world of short fiction, is a big mother-loving deal. Like many of us, July seems to have unbridled daydreams. Unlike most of us, she has wicked follow-through. The bona fides are stone-cold solid; why is it, then, that July's work is so often called "whimsical"? The word feels unfair, a pejorative masquerading as a descriptor - possibly because the word "whimsy" comes from the noun "whimwham," meaning a trinket; possibly also because it carries a connotation of capriciousness. But when you apply the word to any kind of art, it implies that the art is decorative and incompletely thought-through. Not serious, by Jove! Also true: In literary fiction, male writers who use lightness and humor, who spin wildly in the space between one sentence and the next, who push against what's expected, are described as "wry" or "satirical" or just plain "funny." Women are bestowed a tiny, glittering bless-her-heart tiara of "whimsy." Reflexive condescension absolves us from serious engagement. Miranda July is a woman, and a very serious writer who is also very funny. She's challenging. Feed "whimsy" to the birds. Challenging work tends to incite readerly resistance, and I'd bet that "The First Bad Man" will not be exempt from this rule. The violence of the women's relationship will probably turn some readers away, though I found no real shock in it, mostly a sense of glee and wild expansion. July's descriptions of the grosser aspects of personal hygiene made me queasy, but they engaged personal taboos more than global ones. Of greater concern was the novel's strained airlessness. I mean that in the solipsistic sense, the way a little boy sometimes assumes other people wind down like robots as soon as he leaves the room: People seem to stop existing as soon as Cheryl Glickman turns her eyes away from them. Similarly, no real world seems to exist in the novel beyond the tightly constrained one in which Cheryl moves. A novelist is allowed as large or as small a canvas as she wants to use, and July clearly had no intention of writing a self-serious thousand-page brick of a social novel. Still, there are intensely personal, individual stories that seem universal because they speak deep truths about life and love - but in this one, after the early hot contours of Cheryl's awakening, her experience goes a little vague, a little droopy. The elision of all things external to immediate focus is useful in a short story, with its necessarily small span, and July is a brilliant practitioner of short fiction. But in this longer work, the elision feels like an artificial limit. The book ends in precisely the way any perceptive reader who reaches Page 8 would predict. By then, the novel's conventional shape has neutralized some of its early strangeness and potency. The story is a smaller one than it promised early on. STRAIGHT UP, THOUGH, Miranda July is not after perfection: She loves the raw edges of emotion, she likes people and things to be a little worn. Life isn't silky, July is saying. The snags and the snafus bring the joy. I feel deeply for first novels because they often manifest so much anxiety they make me think uncomfortably of children's bell-choirs: hands in soft cotton gloves, the proper notes rung at the proper time, the palpable sense of relief in performer and audience alike when it's all over. A novel is a public performance, and there are immense stakes riding on a writer's first sortie; under all that pressure, mere comfort and melody and competence can seem like laudable goals. But sometimes fine-honed craft can squeeze the vitality out of a book. When we're talking about literary fiction, art is the goal, and a book without vitality is a book without art. That's not a problem for "The First Bad Man," which makes for a wry, smart companion on any day. It's warm. It has a heartbeat and a pulse. This is a book that is painfully alive. LAUREN GROFF is the author, most recently, of the novel "Arcadia."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 18, 2015]

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Review by Booklist Review

Eccentric Cheryl lives alone and works most days from home (her bosses' suggestion) for women's self-defense and fitness company Open Palm. She struggles with globus hystericus a perpetual lump in the throat combined with an inability to cry and tries to refind a baby she met and felt instantly connected to when she was 9, over and over again. When Cheryl allows her bosses' 21-year-old daughter, Clee, to live with her as a favor, and after a long-dreamed-of love confession from Open Palm board member Phillip turns out to be something else, however, Cheryl's ordered world is wildly flipped, making way for sexual obsession and disorder in a way Cheryl may have long tried to avoid. Filmmaker (Me and You and Everyone We Know, 2005, The Future, 2011), short story writer (No One Belongs Here More Than You, 2007), and artist (Learning to Love You More, 2007) July uses novel-length fiction her first and a first-person narrative to her advantage in telling one woman's deeply psychological, often funny, and certainly unconventional story cinematically.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2014 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Middle-aged, quirky, and socially awkward Cheryl leads a solitary life and has an unusual imagination. In addition to sexual fantasies involving her senior coworker Phillip, Cheryl, who is unmarried, also imagines a connection with babies. When her bosses' ask her to temporarily take in their hostile, selfish 20-year-old daughter, Clee, Cheryl's life fundamentally changes-negatively at first, but ultimately for the better. July's original and distinctive writing style is matched by her highly entertaining narration: she embodies the character completely, making her very sympathetic, and her wonderfully understated tone of voice highlights Cheryl's quirkiness and makes it funnier (saying bizarre things in a very calm, neutral voice, as though it's all perfectly normal). Listeners with a taste for whimsical humor and eccentric characters will love this memorable audiobook. A Scribner hardcover. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

July's (No One Belongs Here More Than You) first novel's mannered, grim quirkiness is unlikely to disappoint her longtime fans, but listeners unfamiliar with July's work should be prepared for an unnerving book, the humor of which rests on satire and frequently veers into obscenity but which is remarkably sophisticated for a debut novel. July manages tender observations about human connection and our internal lives, and the novel as a whole has a pleasing terrarium-like quality, rendering as it does a small, isolated, neatly ordered world, perhaps with a deficit of fresh air, but still with enough surprise to be interesting. Cheryl initially seems to be a hapless 43-year-old woman with odd ways of structuring her life. She works for a not-for-profit organization that teaches self-defense to women, run by a couple who maneuver her into taking their voluptuous, sloth-like daughter in as a "roommate." Cheryl's relationship with Clee plays out in surprising ways, illuminating the development of Cheryl's particular tastes and reflecting back to the reader a meditation on the personal nature of desire and purpose and how the meaning in our lives sometimes jumps out and ambushes us. July herself reads, her narration suiting the character and mood of the novel perfectly. VERDICT Recommended to July's fans and those who enjoy quirky fiction. ["This well-written, compelling novel will delight the open-minded reader looking for something new," read the starred review of the Scribner hc, LJ 9/15/14.]-Heather Malcolm, Bow, WA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

In a bizarrely touching first novel, July (It Chooses You, 2011, etc.) brings the characteristic humor, frankness and emotional ruthlessness of her previous work in film, prose and performance to a larger canvas. Cheryl Glickman lives a lonely, precisely arranged life afflicted by mysterious neuroses, including the persistent sensation of a lump in her throat. She obsesses over Phillip Bettelheim, a board member of the nonprofit where she works, and the belief that she keeps meeting a familiar, beloved soul embodied in the babies of strangers. Afflicted by a host of anxieties, both believable and outrageous, Cheryl keeps her world tightly ordered until Clee, her bosses' aggressively rude and monstrously provocative daughter, comes to stay in her house and sets off a sequence of fantasies and disasters that violently transform Cheryl's life. Told in Cheryl's own confiding, unfiltered voice, the novel slides easily between plot and imagination, luring the reader so deeply into Cheryl's interior reality that the ridiculous inventions of her life become progressively more and more convincing. Cheryl acts out simulations from self-defense DVDs with Clee as self-prescribed therapy for her timidity and globus hystericus burdened throat. She becomes fixated on creating graphic, sometimes-perverted sexual fantasies between Clee and a multitude of other people. Her therapist becomes the receptionist of another therapist three times a year as part of "an immensely satisfying adult game." Though these strange details sometimes seem to slide into heavy-handed attempts to shock, at their best, they deliver an emotional slap made sharper and more fitting by their oddity. A sometimes-funny, sometimes-upsetting, surprisingly absorbing novel that lives up to the expectations created by July's earlier work and demonstrates her ability to carry the qualities of her short fiction into the thickly fleshed-out world of a novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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The First Bad Man CHAPTER ONE I drove to the doctor's office as if I was starring in a movie -Phillip was watching--windows down, hair blowing, just one hand on the wheel. When I stopped at red lights, I kept my eyes mysteriously forward. Who is she? people might have been -wondering. Who is that middle-aged woman in the blue Honda? I strolled through the parking garage and into the elevator, pressing 12 with a casual, fun-loving finger. The kind of finger that was up for anything. Once the doors had closed, I checked myself in the mirrored ceiling and practiced how my face would go if Phillip was in the waiting room. Surprised but not overly surprised, and he wouldn't be on the ceiling so my neck wouldn't be craning up like that. All the way down the hall I did the face. Oh! Oh, hi! There was the door. DR. JENS BROYARD CHROMOTHERAPY I swung it open. No Phillip. It took a moment to recover. I almost turned around and went home--but then I wouldn't be able to call him to say thanks for the referral. The receptionist gave me a new-patient form on a clipboard; I sat in an upholstered chair. There was no line that said "referred by," so I just wrote Phillip Bettelheim sent me across the top. "I'm not going to say that he's the best in the whole world," Phillip had said at the Open Palm fundraiser. He was wearing a gray cashmere sweater that matched his beard. "Because there's a color doctor in Zurich who easily rivals him. But Jens is the best in LA, and definitely the best on the west side. He cured my athlete's foot." He lifted his foot and then put it down again before I could smell it. "He's in Amsterdam most of the year so he's very selective about who he sees here. Tell him Phil Bettelheim sent you." He wrote the number on a napkin and began to samba away from me. "Phil Bettelheim sent me." "Exactly!" he yelled over his shoulder. He spent the rest of the night on the dance floor. I stared at the receptionist--she knew Phillip. He might have just left; he might be with the doctor right now. I hadn't thought of that. I tucked my hair behind my ears and watched the door to the exam room. After a minute a willowy woman with a baby boy came out. The baby was swinging a crystal from a string. I checked to see if he and I had a special connection that was greater than his bond with his mother. We didn't. Dr. Broyard had Scandinavian features and wore tiny, judgmental glasses. While he read my new-patient form I sat on a meaty leather couch across from a Japanese paper screen. There weren't any wands or orbs in sight, but I braced myself for something along those lines. If Phillip believed in chromotherapy that was enough for me. Dr. Broyard lowered his glasses. "So. Globus hystericus." I started to explain what it was but he cut me off. "I'm a -doctor." "Sorry." But do real doctors say "I'm a doctor"? He calmly examined my cheeks while stabbing a piece of paper with a red pen. There was a face on the paper, a generic face labeled CHERYL GLICKMAN. "Those marks are . . . ?" "Your rosacea." The paper's eyes were big and round, whereas mine disappear altogether if I smile, and my nose is more potatoey. That said, the spaces between my features are in perfect proportion to each other. So far no one has noticed this. Also my ears: darling little shells. I wear my hair tucked behind them and try to enter crowded rooms ear-first, walking sideways. He drew a circle on the paper's throat and filled it in with careful cross-hatching. "How long have you had the globus?" "On and off for about thirty years. Thirty or forty years." "Have you ever had treatment for it?" "I tried to get a referral for surgery." "Surgery." "To have the ball cut out." "You know it's not a real ball." "That's what they say." "The usual treatment is psychotherapy." "I know." I didn't explain that I was single. Therapy is for couples. So is Christmas. So is camping. So is beach camping. Dr. Broyard rattled open a drawer full of tiny glass bottles and picked one labeled RED. I squinted at the perfectly clear liquid. It reminded me a lot of water. "It's the essence of red," he said brusquely. He could sense my skepticism. "Red is an energy, which only develops a hue in crude form. Take thirty milliliters now and then thirty milliliters each morning before first urination." I swallowed a dropperful. "Why before first urination?" "Before you get up and move around--movement raises your basal body temperature." I considered this. What if a person were to wake up and immediately have sex, before urination? Surely that would raise your basal body temperature too. If I had been in my early thirties instead of my early forties would he have said before first urination or sexual intercourse? That's the problem with men my age, I'm somehow older than them. Phillip is in his sixties, so he probably thinks of me as a younger woman, a girl almost. Not that he thinks of me yet--I'm just someone who works at Open Palm. But that could change in an instant; it could have happened today, in the waiting room. It still might happen, if I called him. Dr. Broyard handed me a form. "Give this to Ruthie at the front desk. I scheduled a follow-up visit, but if your globus worsens before then you might want to consider some kind of counseling." "Do I get one of those crystals?" I pointed to the cluster of them hanging in the window. "A sundrop? Next time." THE RECEPTIONIST XEROXED MY INSURANCE card while explaining that chromotherapy isn't covered by insurance. "The next available appointment is June nineteenth. Do you prefer morning or afternoon?" Her waist-length gray hair was off-putting. Mine is gray too but I keep it neat. "I don't know--morning?" It was only February. By June Phillip and I might be a couple, we might come to Dr. Broyard's together, hand in hand. "Is there anything sooner?" "The doctor's in this office only three times a year." I glanced around the waiting area. "Who will water this plant?" I leaned over and pushed my finger into the fern's soil. It was wet. "Another doctor works here." She tapped the Lucite display holding two stacks of cards, Dr. Broyard's and those of a Dr. Tibbets, LCSW. I tried to take one of each without using my dirty finger. "How's nine forty-five?" she asked, holding out a box of Kleenex. I RACED THROUGH THE PARKING garage, carrying my phone in both hands. Once the doors were locked and the AC was on, I dialed the first nine digits of Phillip's number, then paused. I had never called him before; for the last six years it was always him calling me, and only at Open Palm and only in his capacity as a board member. Maybe this wasn't a good idea. Suzanne would say it was. She made the first move with Carl. Suzanne and Carl were my bosses. "If you feel a connection, don't be shy about it," she'd once said. "What's an example of not being shy about it?" "Show him some heat." I waited four days, to spread out the questions, and then I asked her for an example of showing heat. She looked at me for a long time and then pulled an old envelope out of the trash and drew a pear on it. "This is how your body is shaped. See? Teeny tiny on top and not so tiny on the bottom." Then she explained the illusion created by wearing dark colors on the bottom and bright colors on top. When I see other women with this color combination I check to see if they're a pear too and they always are--two pears can't fool each other. Below her drawing she wrote the phone number of someone she thought was more right for me than Phillip--a divorced alcoholic father named Mark Kwon. He took me out to dinner at Mandarette on Beverly. When that didn't pan out she asked me if she was barking up the wrong tree. "Maybe it's not Mark you don't like? Maybe it's men?" People sometimes think this because of the way I wear my hair; it happens to be short. I also wear shoes you can actually walk in, Rockports or clean sneakers instead of high-heeled foot jewelry. But would a homosexual woman's heart leap at the sight of a sixty-five-year-old man in a gray sweater? Mark Kwon remarried a few years ago; Suzanne made a point of telling me. I pressed the last digit of Phillip's number. "Hello?" He sounded asleep. "Hi, it's Cheryl." "Oh?" "From Open Palm." "Oh, hello, hello! Wonderful fundraiser, I had a blast. How can I help you, Cheryl?" "I just wanted to tell you I saw Dr. Broyard." There was a long pause. "The chromotherapist," I added. "Jens! He's great, right?" I said I thought he was phenomenal. This had been my plan, to use the same word that he had used to describe my necklace at the fundraiser. He had lifted the heavy beads off my chest and said, "This is phenomenal, where'd you get it?" and I said, "From a vendor at the farmer's market," and then he used the beads to pull me toward him. "Hey," he said, "I like this, this is handy." An outsider, such as Nakako the grant writer, might have thought this moment was degrading, but I knew the degradation was just a joke; he was mocking the kind of man who would do something like that. He's been doing these things for years; once, during a board meeting, he insisted my blouse wasn't zipped up in back, and then he unzipped it, laughing. I'd laughed too, immediately reaching around to close it back up. The joke was, Can you believe people? The tacky kinds of things they do? But it had another layer to it, because imitating crass people was kind of liberating--like pretending to be a child or a crazy person. It was something you could do only with someone you really trusted, someone who knew how capable and good you actually were. After he released his hold on my necklace I had a brief coughing fit, which led to a discussion of my globus and the color doctor. The word phenomenal didn't seem to trigger anything in him; he was saying Dr. Broyard was expensive but worth it and then his voice began rising toward a polite exit. "Well, I guess I'll see you at the board meeting to--" but before he could say morrow, I interrupted. "When in doubt, give a shout!" "Excuse me?" "I'm here for you. When in doubt, just give me a shout." What silence. Giant domed cathedrals never held so much emptiness. He cleared his throat. It echoed, bouncing around the dome, startling pigeons. "Cheryl?" "Yes?" "I think I should go." I didn't say anything. He would have to step over my dead body to get off the phone. "Goodbye," he said, and then, after a pause, he hung up. I put the phone in my purse. If the red was already working then my nose and eyes would now be pierced with that beautiful stinging sensation, a million tiny pins, culminating in a giant salty rush, the shame moving through my tears and out to the gutter. The cry climbed to my throat, swelling it, but instead of surging upward it hunkered down right there, in a belligerent ball. Globus hystericus. Something hit my car and I jumped. It was the door of the car next to mine; a woman was maneuvering her baby into its car seat. I held my throat and leaned forward to get a look, but her hair blocked its face so there was no way to tell if it was one of the babies I think of as mine. Not mine biologically, just . . . familiar. I call those ones Kubelko Bondy. It only takes a second to check; half the time I don't even know I'm doing it until I'm already done. The Bondys were briefly friends with my parents in the early seventies. Mr. and Mrs. Bondy and their little boy, Kubelko. Later, when I asked my mom about him, she said she was sure that wasn't his name, but what was his name? Kevin? Marco? She couldn't remember. The parents drank wine in the living room and I was instructed to play with Kubelko. Show him your toys. He sat silently by my bedroom door holding a wooden spoon, sometimes hitting it against the floor. Wide black eyes, fat pink jowls. He was a young boy, very young. Barely more than a year old. After a while he threw his spoon and began to wail. I watched him crying and waited for someone to come but no one came so I heaved him onto my small lap and rocked his chubby body. He calmed almost immediately. I kept my arms around him and he looked at me and I looked at him and he looked at me and I knew that he loved me more than his mother and father and that in some very real and permanent way he belonged to me. Because I was only nine it wasn't clear if he belonged to me as a child or as a spouse, but it didn't matter, I felt myself rising up to the challenge of heartache. I pressed my cheek against his cheek and held him for what I hoped would be eternity. He fell asleep and I drifted in and out of consciousness myself, unmoored from time and scale, his warm body huge then tiny--then abruptly seized from my arms by the woman who thought of herself as his mother. As the adults made their way to the door saying tired too-loud thank-yous, Kubelko Bondy looked at me with panicked eyes. Do something. They're taking me away. I will, don't worry, I'll do something. Of course I wouldn't just let him sail out into the night, not my own dear boy. Halt! Unhand him! But my voice was too quiet, it didn't leave my head. Seconds later he sailed out into the night, my own dear boy. Never to be seen again. Except I did see him again--again and again. Sometimes he's a newborn, sometimes he's already toddling along. As I pulled out of my parking spot I got a better look at the baby in the car next to mine. Just some kid. Excerpted from The First Bad Man by Miranda July All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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