The First Bad Man by Miranda JulyScribner (Simon & Schuster), 2015

I was worried, at first, that The First Bad Man was going to be weird for the sake of weirdness, and awkward/uncomfortable without any sort of payoff for it. But while the book is plenty weird and awkward and uncomfortable, it’s also funny and readable and sometimes surprisingly sweet. The narrator is Cheryl Glickman, who starts the book as a forty-something-year-old woman who’s pretty stuck in her life and in her head. She’s romantically unfulfilled (she’s smitten with an older man she knows from work, but he’s not interested in her), she suffers from a globus (the sensation of a lump in the throat), and she has a “system” for ordering her house, which mainly consists of using fewer dishes, to avoid a downward spiral that starts with dirty dishes piling up in the sink and ends, she says, with staying in her room and “pee[ing] in cups because they’re closer to the bed” (21). Her biggest moments of connection seem to be the imagined ones she has with certain babies she passes in the street or the park or wherever: she feels she has a connection to them, and imagines them as reincarnations, sort of, of a baby she felt close to, briefly, when she was a child. But then her bosses ask if someone can give their twenty-year-old daughter, Clee, someplace to stay until she gets a job and apartment of her own. Cheryl has no intention of taking Clee in, but then she does, and Clee’s presence ends up changing everything, resulting in various physical and sexual and maternal awakenings for Cheryl. I don’t really know how to talk about this book: there are so many bizarre plot threads that July somehow manages to make work, and there are key plot elements that I think work best as surprises, with the reader figuring things out alongside of (or just ahead of) the narrator. If you want more detailed and coherent thoughts, I think Lauren Groff’s review in the New York Times is pretty spot-on.