Filmmaker's stories whimsical but uneven

Published 5 August 2007 in Winnipeg Free Press:

No One Belongs Here More Than You
By Miranda July
Scribner, 205 pages, $27.99

Reviewed by Michael Stimpson

Already a noted video and performance artist, Miranda July scored major festival prizes and praise from reviewers in 2005 for her debut as a feature film director. The charming, contemplative Me and You and Everyone We Know won the Camera d’Or (for best feature by a novice director) at Cannes, and many other awards.

Now the 33-year-old California resident, born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger, flexes her talents in a new medium with this slim collection of 16 short stories. The result will likely please anyone who enjoyed her movie, though the stories are of uneven quality.

Whether you like No One Belongs Here More Than You will depend in large part on how you feel about the quirky world in which July’s fiction exists.

As in her movie, this book is populated by characters who constantly daydream to escape loneliness and insecurity. A fortysomething woman fantasizes about Prince William in one story; in another, a factory worker is preoccupied with imagining what a co-worker’s sister looks like.

Sometimes a character’s distraction leads to danger or tragedy, but usually the flights of fancy end in soft landings.

The collection kicks off with The Shared Patio, about a woman who shares apartment patio space with a couple.

She’s careful to reinforce the space’s shared “ownership” by being sure to use it roughly as much as the couple does. “Every time I see them out there, I put a little mark on my calendar. The next time the patio is empty, I go sit on it. Then I cross off the mark on my calendar. Sometimes I lag behind and have to sit out there a lot toward the end of the month to catch up.”

One day, while sharing the patio with the couple’s male half, the narrator’s PG-rated erotic daydream about him distracts her from noticing a medical crisis in process.

Perhaps the best story in the bunch is Ten True Things, in which a receptionist interprets the mere mention by her boss’s wife of a sewing class as an invitation to enroll in that class.

The two women get to know each other in a scene that involves nakedness and touching but nothing really sexual. It’s the sort of peculiar behaviour those who loved July’s film would expect from her.

This is mostly entertaining stuff, though a few of the stories read like creative writing class assignments that need a little more work or perhaps should have been discarded.

In The Swim Team, the narrator tells her ex-boyfriend of how she once taught swim classes in a small apartment. Her elderly students learned to breathe for swimming by putting their faces in bowls full of water, and they crossed her living room via dry swim strokes on the floor.

The story’s mildly amusing, but has no other redeeming quality.

And July’s prose is deficient in narrative voice. Whether a story’s narrator is a middle-aged man who works in a factory or a 20-something woman fresh out of college with literary aspirations, that narrator talks pretty much the same way as the storyteller in any of this book’s other entries. It “sounds” like the same person in every story.

Of course, you could, if you wish, view that narrative voice as a strength – a distinctive style, July’s own “brand.”

One reads this book’s last pages with a feeling of hope that much better work is yet to come from July’s whimsical creative mind.