Book review: The First Bad Man by Miranda July

To call this book, which is Miranda July's novelistic debut, an unpredictable roller-coaster would be a total understatement. I am fairly sure that I went through more emotions reading this book than possibly anything else I've ever read. During the first few chapters I felt weirded out and mildly confused, then very uncomfortable, then somewhat disgusted, then happy, and finally, at the end of the book, content. 

Cheryl is possibly the strangest character I have ever encountered in a book. To me, it's absolutely wonderful to encounter a very strange female character in a novel, as usually highly-developed or off-the-wall characters are male. I found it immensely refreshing to find a character who is bizarre, a total control freak, and FEMALE. Her voice is at first unsettling and hard to get used to, but eventually I came to love Cheryl and actually found myself identifying with her on some levels. 

We follow Cheryl on her day-to-day journeys in her mundane life as a manager at a company that makes self-defense DVDs. It's clear from the outset that Cheryl is sexually repressed and obsessive-compulsive. In particular, she is obsessed with a man she works with. However, this obsession is partially derailed when her boss's 20-year-old daughter is forced upon her and takes over her home. Clee is another unconventional female character, but even less of a breath of fresh air than Cheryl is. Clee is disgusting, has a foot odour problem, and is unemployed until she finds a crappy job at a supermarket. Clee causes Cheryl's life to spin madly out of control in the most unpredictable ways imaginable; and so the roller-coaster begins. Cheryl's OCD is triggered to the extreme by Clee's vulgarity and nonchalance. Despite being polar opposites, Clee and Cheryl find a bizarre middle ground in role-playing fights from the self-defense DVDs, and the story only gets weirder and more unpredictable from there. 

However, despite the initially unpalatable characters and plot, July's writing is meticulous, and every piece of the puzzle finds its place in the end. This book is hard to get into at first, but if you stick with it, you won't regret it. Four stars out of five.