All Fours

The narrator’s penchant for fantasy captures the interconnection between her life, her identity, and her artwork. At the start of the novel, she’s attempting to satisfy the expectations of her gender. As a wife and a mother, she tries to fulfill her domestic responsibilities to her husband and child without complaint. Though the narrator is at heart an artist, her family, culture, and society have conditioned her to compartmentalize her home life from her creative life. This is why she spends much of her time closed into her studio in the garage. The garage studio reifies the narrator’s attempts to keep her artistic self and her domestic self separate. However, her work is so urgent to her that she perpetually feels as if she’s “circling her central concerns in a sort of ecstatic fugue state with the confidence that comes from knowing there is no other path—her whole life will be this single conversation with God” (6). Despite her artistic compulsions, at five o’ clock every evening she must “consciously dial [her]self down before reentering the house” (6). Over time, her compartmentalization habits cause her tremendous internal anxiety and angst. Her feelings of entrapment at home in Los Angeles stem in part from her inability to let her life and her art coexist, merge, and inform one another.

In Monrovia, the narrator’s experiences let her live inside her artistic imaginings and creations in a way she never did before, and she’s free to bring her fantasies to life. At home, she normally channels these into her fiction. However, in Monrovia, she dreams up a room from France and orchestrates its creation, and she fantasizes about a young man at the gas station and compels an attraction between them. For a time, living in these artistic fantasies feels liberating to her. However, once she returns to Los Angeles, she struggles to readjust to her cold, literal reality because she “weighted things too heavily in the direction of music and poetry” while in Monrovia, and her spirit “thusly animated, [came] to think of itself as a full person” (141).

When the narrator’s artistic and lived experiences are allowed to coexist, she feels more like herself. The repeated descriptions of dance particularly reify this thematic notion. In watching Davey dance, she sees the ways that the body and mind, the artistic and the lived, merge to create one beautiful new version of truth. She notices this phenomenon in his dance, in which the performed and the lived become indistinguishable. The novel thus argues that life and art are inextricable. They not only inform one another but create harmonious new realms of experience and understanding when allowed to coincide.