It Chooses You by Miranda July
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"The PennySaver sellers were so moving to me, so lifelike and realistic, that my script - the entire fiction [...] - now seemed totally boring by comparison."

My first contact with Miranda July's work was in 2006 when my wife and I watched her movie Me and You and Everyone We Know, which we both loved. A few years later, before my Goodreads days, I had read her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More than You, and again liked it a lot. Alas someone borrowed the book from us and never returned it so I have read It Chooses You (2011) instead. Quite disappointing! Gone is the enchanting whimsy of the movie and the stories.

The book is narrated by a 35-year-old, recently married woman, an independent movie director who enjoyed a successful film debut a few years earlier. She is now trying to complete a screenplay for her second movie, but struggles with a bit of a writing block, or maybe with the "sophomore curse." Of course, the description fits Ms. July herself, who indeed spent quite some time working on her second movie The Future.

In order to justify her procrastination with the screenplay and - ostensibly to gather additional material for the movie - she undertakes a seemingly fascinating project. She studies Pennysaver, a pre-Internet equivalent of craigslist, selects interesting ads and interviews people who sell strange stuff. We meet a retired man in process of transitioning to a woman, who is selling a leather jacket. We also meet a young man selling bullfrog tadpoles at $2.50 each and a woman who offers baby leopards and various birds for sale. In what I find the most fascinating piece of merchandise, we are introduced to a woman who is selling photo albums of people who have died and whose albums have been rescued from trash. The sellers tell the narrator - Ms. July - their life stories and she implies that she uses these stories as inspiration in her work on the screenplay. The written pieces are accompanied by documentary-style pictures taken during the interviews by a well-known photographer, Ms. Sire.

This is a very pleasant and absorbing read yet I suspect that the author is a victim of a common fallacy: she believes that by describing actual, real-life people, the prose becomes more realistic and is more likely to convey transcendent truths about life. Quite the contrary, the specificity of situations of actual people makes generalizations more difficult: the "real-lifeness" of an actual person strips the vestiges of generality. Nothing can be more realistic than well-written fiction.

I do not believe It Chooses You is literature; it is instead a sort of reportage, a set of feature stories about strange people, yes, interesting and smooth, very readable, yet the book does not contribute in a significant way to enriching the portrayal of human condition, which seems to have been the author's objective. In this sense I consider this effort a failure. I still admire Ms. July's other work and will look for her set of stories to be able to assign a higher rating than just

Two stars.


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