“No One Belongs Here More Than You” is beautifully eccentric
Miranda July’s “No One Belongs Here More Than You” allows readers to briefly peek into the lives of lonely strangers and their seemingly insignificant encounters and deep desires.
All of the 16 short stories in the book are quirky. In “The Swim Team” a bored woman in a small town begins to teach swim lessons to three elderly strangers. Lacking any nearby pool or lake, she sets bowls of warm water on her kitchen floor to teach them the butterfly stroke and needle-nose dives.
Although the concepts behind the stories are interesting, the most amazing part of the book is the way July weaves her words through the tales she tells. The elegance and clarity of her sentences are beautiful; she has a talent of putting secret, wordless desires onto the page in a way that is both strangely relatable and slightly humorous.
The book opens with a woman’s realization of her love for a neighbor while he is having an epileptic seizure. She begins, “It still counts, even though it happened when he was unconscious. It counts doubly because the conscious mind often makes mistakes, falls for the wrong person. But down there in the well, where there is no light and only thousand-year-old water, a man has no reason to make mistakes. God says do it and you do it. Love her and it is so.”
The characters’ lives are similar because they have failed to complete their dreams. Their encounters and desires blindly control them and their actions.
This lack of diversity in character ambitions is where the book slightly fails. The narrator of each story sounds surprisingly similar to every other one despite their gender, sexual orientation or age.
However, the reality of dissatisfaction is laid bare so successfully in several stories that they are sure to stand out despite their similarities.
Readers are sure to enjoy the ironic reality presented in “Mon Plaisir.” This story follows the lives of a couple who share common practices and living space, but not love. They decide to become movie extras, and in the background of a restaurant scene they wordlessly deliver a romantically spontaneous and engrossing performance. Once the cameras stop, they unblinkingly realize the truth of reality and separate without regret or ceremony.
Despite July’s elegant delivery and original story plots, this book is best enjoyed by those with a taste for the eccentric. Like her independent movie “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” her stories are sure to be a hit among those who crave the sincerity of the lonely human experience.
The book is already in stores and the paperback edition will be available in bookstores May 6.
You can contact Campus Press Staff Writer Morgan Keys at morgan.keys@colorado.edu
