She commandeers the living room, makes a mess of the kitchen and declines to bathe, thereby smelling up the place. Clee has “a blond, tan largeness of scale” and terrible manners. What jolts Cheryl out of her fantasy world is the arrival at her home of an unwanted guest: Clee, the 20-year-old daughter of her employers, who say that Clee needs a place to stay in Los Angeles until she finds a job and an apartment. Caveman and cavewoman.” This relationship exists only in Cheryl’s head, but she tells herself that everything could “change in an instant” if she called him or ran into him. Cheryl has long had a crush on Phillip, an older board member - whenever she sees him, she says, she has to “resist the urge to go to him like a wife, as if we’d already been a couple for a hundred thousand lifetimes.
We learn that she’s been working for years at an organization called Open Palm, which started as a repurposed dojo that taught women self-defense, then began selling instructional and fitness DVDs. Such pronouncements are ridiculous, of course, but seem meant to underscore just how depressed - and delusional - Cheryl really is. The solution, Cheryl insists, is what she calls her “system” - getting rid of things (dishes “can’t pile up if you don’t have them”) and conserving energy (“can’t you read the book standing right next to the shelf with your finger holding the spot you’ll put it back into? Or better yet: don’t read it.”) The person begins to throw trash anywhere and pee in cups because they’re closer to the bed.” So the person starts eating with dirty forks out of dirty dishes and this makes the person feel like a homeless person. Soon the dishes are piled sky-high and it seems impossible to even clean a fork.
“Let’s say a person is down in the dumps, or maybe just lazy,” Cheryl says, “and they stop doing the dishes. The novel starts off tentatively, veers into derivative and willfully sensational theater-of-the-absurd drama - part Pinter, part Genet - and then mutates, miraculously, into an immensely moving portrait of motherhood and what it means to take care of a child.Ĭheryl Glickman, the narrator of “The First Bad Man,” initially comes across as an extreme version of one of those sad-sack middle-aged Anne Tyler characters who have fallen into a funk of low expectations and lower energy. The first novel by the filmmaker and artist Miranda July is like one of those strange mythological creatures that are part one thing, part another - a griffin or a chimera, perhaps, or a sphinx.
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