Miranda July
No One Belongs Here More Than You
[Scribner]
Short stories from noted filmmaker
July’s first collection of stories treads the quirky path paved by her 2005 feature-film debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know. Whether it’s a young woman giving swimming lessons using bowls of water, or a rock star’s illicit relationship with her father, July effectively tempers her characters’ stumbles through life with a sense of the surreal.
With a desperate need to connect, most of the denizens of her world find themselves in relationships inappropriate (often with younger people), unexpected (two cases of elderly people experiencing same-sex relations) or imaginary (a woman who believes she and Prince William are soul mates).
The only problem—as with most collections containing stories that riff on the same themes—is that characters and situations begin to blur into one another. Yet this oddly grants a wholeness to the book, for as each person discovers that the world is a cruel place, so do we.