I reserved Miranda July’s All Fours at the library after hearing it was a road trip book, and had been included on the Women’s Prize for Fiction list.

I soon realised this was not a road trip book. A woman, who has had some sort of successful, unspecified artistic career, reaches her forties and feels herself at a turning point. She decides to go on a solo road trip across America, but only gets as far as a motel about half an hour from home. Here she has a kind of highly creative breakdown, employing her significant personal wealth and febrile imagination to turn her humble motel room into luxury accommodation over three days of intense effort. She then spends the next few weeks in her special room, enjoying the company of a younger man. Their affair is described in the sort of detail that Henry Miller might have used in Tropic of Cancer, if Miller’s protagonist had been a neat and tidy Californian woman rather than a seedy New York man living in Paris. Anyway, following her motel sojourn, the woman returns home and desperately tries to carry on with her normal life, pretending to her husband that her state of acute distraction is due to the menopause. And then, as if fate is having its fun, a routine medical check-up reveals that she is actually approaching this time in her life.

Rather than a road trip, All Fours is about women dealing with the menopause. Although I did wonder at this point if I was the intended audience, I kept reading. Partly this was to learn something about an experience that was not my own. All Fours is very much about the specificity of experience. As well as facing the menopause, which is specific to women, the narrator also recalls suffering a very rare complication during the birth of her child, which causes almost all of the baby’s blood to drain back into the mother. Against all odds the baby survives, but this traumatic experience stays with its mother, so that she is always looking for the few people in the world who would understand what she had been through.

So is this book actually for woman who have suffered the rare birth complication known as fetal maternal haemorrhage?

To answer that question, notice I have not mentioned the name of the narrator. This is because she isn’t given one. The lack of a name goes along with her mysterious job, never fully described. There is a lack of specificity here – like the narrator is ‘Everywoman’ or something. It makes you wonder if the fact that we all experience life slightly differently constitutes our common ground.

The trend in fiction writing is towards fragmentation, with different books designed for different groups of people. Of course people have always read novels to take them outside their normal experience, just as they’ve always wanted to go on road trips to new and unfamiliar places. But every road trip eventually brings you home again, and a novel, if it’s good, will still reflect something that we all tend to recognise as familiar. And maybe that sense is more important than ever. All Fours does both specific and general in a very interesting way.

The book might not be to everyone’s taste, but it still manages to take the individuality of taste and make you think about it, combining sparky wit with affecting emotion, particularly in the first half. I’m glad I read it.