Sometimes, more often than not lately, I try to write my reviews in the voice of the author of the book I just finished. In part, this is because I just finished the book and the author's voice had overwriten mine for a while and I hadn't yet reverted back to the voice I'd begun with. I'm pretty sure there is such a thing as a voice of my own but at the same time, I know that we are all co-constructions of our culture as well. Part of that self-creation in fact just took place because I had perused a few of the other reviews of this book before I began writing my own. It's almost as if I was afraid I might say something too original if I didn't first consult the general tide of opinion.

What I noticed was that some readers positively hated the book and, though their reasons made no sense to me, I sort of knew what they'd meant. I had felt some of that dislike early on to the point that I almost stopped reading. What made me continue reading wasn't pleasure, but a wish to solve a puzzle. There's something she does in her writing that I needed to figure out, like it was a brain teaser I had run across in a magazine and felt a compulsion to solve. The something I needed to name was a uniformity that gave many of the stories a sameness. I would forget, at times, exactly which story I was in, expecting characters from one of the other stories to show up.

At one point, I thought I was close to the solution. I had been reading while waiting my turn to be photographed for an ID card and the person at the desk, a middle aged Asian woman, called me over and said "You don't have anyone to notify in case of emergency." She meant that I had left that part of the application blank, but the way she phrased it made it sound tragic. "It's optional," she added, because I must have looked worried. I smiled and explained that, after filling out so much application, I had become tired of entering the familiar facts of my documentary life, and noticing that no more was required of me, I took advantage of the opportunity to stop writing. As I said this, I thought that there was something so Miranda July about this interchange.

It was the multiplicity of levels--the presumed importance of the data I was supplying along side my casual refusal to grant it that importance, all being played out over the issue of an emergency contact, with the implied intimacy or lack thereof.

And that's exactly what I had found annoying about the book. Everything and nothing was important at the same time. There is a pervasive irony tuned so precisely that at times you can't be sure it's really still there and that maybe you are adding it yourself and blaming it on Miranda.

And yet that precision is somehow beautiful, and my characterization of it isn't the whole story. It isn't formulaic, as I feared, but something artful instead. It is something I can't copy and parody but have to appreciate instead.

By the end I wanted to give it 5 stars, as if the number of stars I gave a book were of some kind of cosmic significance, but, remembering my early annoyance, I stopped at 4.