The protagonists in Miranda July’s collection No One Belongs Here More Than You are all quirky. In some stories, like Juno, that’s charming. But Juno is a movie not written by Miranda July and it does not appear in this book. In the stories that do appear and that are written by Miranda July, quirky is not charming.
These characters each have a quirky inner world, meaning they daydream and think of weird, quirky connections between things, usually between them and someone they imagine they are dating. Thing is, these inner worlds are just weird, plain wrong, and have no connection to any world recognizable to me. One character daydreams a relationship with her downstairs neighbor while sitting with him on a shared patio when he’s having an epileptic seizure. Another imagines her ideal lover as a dark nameless shape that inhabits the body of a boy in the special needs
class where she is an assistant. Sometimes they make decisions that are quirky, like the couple who break up because they spent everything they had emotionally acting silently as extras in a movie.
Aside from trying to make her characters just a little bit but really way too far off, Miranda July made these stories very clever. For instance, she has a woman teaching old people how to swim without a pool. By flopping around on a floor with a bowl of water in front of them, which one is suitably scared of putting her face in. And thus she is the coach of a swim team. Isn’t that clever?
There’s a pathos about all the characters. Lives of quiet desperation and whatnot. Except that it lost all potency with me because I didn’t care about the actors in these stories. They didn’t seem real to me so why would I give a rip about them? Perhaps I should have appreciated their child-like nature, but I didn’t.
Title: No one belongs here more than you: stories
Author: Miranda July
Imprint / publisher: Scribner / Simon & Schuster
Format: Paperback
Length: 201 p.
Publication date: May 2008 (hardcover 2007)
ISBN-10: 0-7432-9941-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9941-1
Subject: Short stories, American
LC classification: PS3610.U537N6 2007
