The compulsive narrator of Miranda July's The First Bad Man, Cheryl Glickman is a single woman in her 40s working for a women's self-defense nonprofit called Open Palm. With erotic fantasies about an older man on the company's board, meticulous housekeeping habits preening her one-bedroom California bungalow, a strange fixation on a toddler from her past whom she calls Kubelko Bondy, and a recurrent psychosomatic "globus hystericus," Cheryl can barely keep it together. When the couple who manage Open Palm ask her to take in their 20-year-old daughter, Clee, as a temporary houseguest, Cheryl's obsessions kick into overdrive: "I laid out towels with the sugarless mint... dumped some baking soda down the garbage disposal." But Clee is a knock-out ("she had a blond, tan largeness of scale... [and wore] tight magenta sweatpants low on her hips and several tank tops, or maybe a purple bra and two tank tops--there was an accumulation of straps on her shoulders"), and Cheryl dumps her older-man fantasy for a mad affair with Clee. When Clee mysteriously becomes pregnant, Cheryl becomes not just a lover, but also midwife, breast pump timekeeper and legal guardian of the baby boy.
The First Bad Man's eccentric narrator, raucous scenes and through-the-looking-glass plot are no surprise given July's own eclectic creative output. An independent filmmaker (The Future), actress, short story writer (No One Belongs Here More Than You), performance artist and participatory e-mail curator (We Think Alone), July is a force to be reckoned with. As wacky as her first novel might sound, it cleverly unfolds to tell an almost traditional story of love, friendship, fortitude and motherhood. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.