We first meet Cheryl playing out one of her autoerotic daydreams: 'I drove to the doctor's office as if I was starring in a movie Phillip was watching.' The doctor is a quack, a 'chromotherapist' who hands out colors to treat psychosomatic illnesses but then, Cheryl's whole sense of self is based on lies.Īt any rate, it's not the chromotherapist who will change her life, but Clee, a thuggish, gum-snapping young woman foisted on Cheryl by Clee's despairing parents - who happen to be Cheryl's employers. She also believes in her daily encounters with the soul of a baby who is being reborn again and again in an effort to be near her. Griffiths' 'Intolerance.' Cheryl believes, for instance, that she and Phillip, a graying lothario on the board of the self-defense studio where she works, have been making love to each other's incarnations across the sweep of centuries - they just haven't gotten around to it yet in this life. Most importantly of all, there's a system for convincing herself that she's not utterly alone on the planet, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.Ĭheryl keeps herself going with baroque fantasies that would embarrass Walter Mitty, some of them grotesquely banal, others straight out of D.

Obsessive-compulsive and terminally repressed, Cheryl lives by her 'systems.' There's a system for the dishes and a system for putting away bath towels, a system for reaching orgasm and a system for swallowing food when her globus hystericus is acting up - that's a lump in the throat, in hypochondriac-ese, which Cheryl speaks fluently. The narrator in 'The First Bad Man' is Cheryl Glickman, an androgynous, socially awkward woman in her 40s. In 'The First Bad Man,' as in her most recent film, a fussy opening scenario has time to unfold like an origami fortune-teller, revealing emotional landscapes that are satisfyingly complex, if slightly wrinkled.

In her 2007 short story collection 'No One Belongs Here More Than You' and performance-art/publishing hybrids like 2011's 'It Chooses You,' they sometimes feel like they need a little air so it's good to see July stretch her legs. Her offbeat characters are solitary dots on a very quirky graph, yearning to become part of something parabolic. Loneliness is July's religion, and transcending it her art. In 'The First Bad Man,' the debut novel by the ambi-talented writer, director and artist, a woman reads aloud from a website called '' and sympathizes with the baby-to-be: 'I could see it so clearly, the zygote - shiny and bulbous, filled with the electric memory of being two but now damned with the eternal loneliness of being just one. Nobody writes a conception scene like Miranda July.

The first bad man novel