The First Bad Man has time to unfold like an origami fortune-teller, revealing emotional landscapes that are satisfyingly complex, if slightly wrinkled…darker and more delicious than anything you'd expect.”

Screwy Squirrel: Why, you— (notices audience) Oh, pardon me. (closes door and... blows a raspberry into the speaker.) Such pronouncements are ridiculous, of course, but seem meant to underscore just how depressed — and delusional — Cheryl really is. 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. 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. 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. Open Mouth, Insert Foot: One of the literal gags in "Symphony in Slang," as the hipster explains that "every time [he] opened [his] mouth, [he] put [his] foot in it." Norwood currently runs eight charity shops across North and East London thanks to the support of 150 dedicated volunteers. Deliberately Jumping the Gun: In "The Chump Champ", Droopy and Spike are competing in sports events. For the first event, the 100 meter dash, Spike has the starting pistol, but after going "On your mark, get set..." he runs to within one step away from the finish line. The moment he yells "Go!" and fires the gun, Droopy instantly zips to the finish line, then tells Spike that he might be cheating.

Crushing Handshake: In Droopy's Double Trouble, Droopy's super strong twin cousin Drippy crushes the hand of Droopy's superior, the mansion's head butler, upon extending it for a shake. I’m not going to say that he’s the best in the whole world,” Phillip had said at the Open Palm fundraiser. He was wearing a gray cashmere sweater that matched his beard. “Because there’s a color doctor in Zurich who easily rivals him. But Jens is the best in LA, and definitely the best on the west side. He cured my athlete’s foot.” He lifted his foot and then put it down again before I could smell it. “He’s in Amsterdam most of the year so he’s very selective about who he sees here. Tell him Phil Bettelheim sent you.” He wrote the number on a napkin and began to samba away from me. My main criticism is that the satire is not sufficiently consistent, or perhaps not sufficiently intentional. Throughout large passages in the book, I felt that July was actually encouraging the reader to buy into what I had hoped she was ripping off - for example, the epilogue reads too much to me like a happy ending. I think this book works *only* as satire - not as e.g. a post-modern love story. The characters are not well-drawn enough for the latter; they are caricatures, and they don't elicit sympathy from an intelligent reader. Rapid-Fire Descriptors: The short Big Heel-Watha describes the title character as a "flat-faced, pigeon-toed, knob-kneed, blubber-headed tub of lard". We don’t always know what intimate life consists of until novels tells us…a powerful mother-son love story… [the ending] leaves one thrillingly breathless…one realizes only then that one has been waiting the whole time for this very thing. And so one welcomes the multitalented Miranda July to the land of novel-writing…No one belongs here more than she.”

In a bizarrely touching first novel, July ( It Chooses You, 2011, etc.) brings the characteristic humor, frankness and emotional ruthlessness of her previous work in film, prose and performance to a larger canvas. Fake Rabies: In the Droopy short "Wags to Riches," Spike puts shaving cream on a sleeping Droopy and phones in a report of a mad dog, but a fan blows the foam onto Spike's face just as the dog catcher arrives. Obnoxious In-Laws: "The House of Tomorrow" had a Running Gag about features "for the mother-in-law" that were clearly intended to show she's not welcome.I still do not really know what it is about even after thinking about, and reflecting on it for the past couple of months. It tells the story of Cheryl, who appears to be a 40 something, slightly lonely single woman who starts a masochistic relationship with the daughter of her employers. I say ‘appears to be’ because I am not sure what parts of the story are real and what parts are fantasy. In our book group discussion on this book, we all had different theories about what was real, what was fake, and in fact what the book was actually about. All the theories had merit but none that we felt totally convinced by. Hypocritical Humor: In "Little Rural Riding Hood", when the country wolf is unable to control himself at the sight of Red and tries to rush the stage to join her, his cousin, the city wolf, has no choice but to return him home to the country — only to become equally crazily attracted to the country version of Red, thus prompting the country wolf to take him home to the city! 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... An immensely moving portrait of motherhood and what it means to take care of a child...July writes of Cheryl’s discovery of maternal love with heartfelt emotion and power."