Human longings

THE characters in these stories by Miranda July are a lonely and varied lot. They include an old man who waits to be introduced to a woman who doesn’t exist; a husband who wants to be allowed to love his wife’s birthmark; a woman who can express romantic interest to her husband only while they are extras on a movie set. But they all clamor to tell the reader one thing: They want to be loved. Badly. Now.

July, known for her 2005 film “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” now presents her first story collection, “No One Belongs Here More Than You.” July writes about desire -- to be understood, to be part of another person. Her characters speak with one captivating voice that articulates the bewildering state of being human: We all sit, perplexed, in our own bodies, but want to be connected to someone else.

In the strongest story, the superb “Something That Needs Nothing,” the young narrator begins by saying, “In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents. I even had two. They would never let me go, so I didn’t say goodbye.”

The narrator runs away with her girlfriend Pip (“This was tremendously exciting for one of us. One of us had always been in love with the other”), and the story explores the way their infatuation with each other becomes tarnished. They briefly become prostitutes; Pip falls in love with a girl named Kate and abandons the narrator; the narrator becomes a performer in a peep show.

She manipulates Pip into picking her up after work, and they become involved again, with one caveat: the narrator, now calling herself “Gwen,” must always wear the wig she dons as a peep show girl. Gwen’s surreal descent into this life, and the fact that Pip will make love to her only when she wears her cumbersome hairpiece, becomes a beautiful metaphor for the way love itself can be ephemeral and the attentions of a lover based on the most fragile of things.

The engine that drives these stories is July’s voice -- the book is full of wistful, wonderful observations about the limits of connection, about the hopes and disappointments of intimacy. In “The Man on the Stairs” she writes: “[I]n my eyes, he would see the words: I never really knew true love. Would he empathize with us? Does he know what it’s like? Most people do. You always feel like you are the only one in the world, like everyone else is crazy for each other, but it’s not true. Generally, people don’t like each other very much. And that goes for friends, too. Sometimes I lie in bed trying to decide which of my friends I truly care about, and I always come to the same conclusion: none of them. I thought these were just my starter friends and the real ones would come along later. But no. These are my real friends.”

July’s stories vary from short, almost prose-poem lengths to much longer narratives; the longer stories buoyed me along more than the shorter ones did. The sketchy, conceptual quality of “I Kiss a Door” and “The Boy From Lam Kien” makes them less satisfying. When July gives her characters time to develop and truly explore their worlds and feelings, their journeys are deeper and more moving.

July is interested in dramatizing the erotic undertones that exist in ordinary life. In “Making Love in 2003,” a young writer is waiting to meet a businessman who had promised to help her with her career. As she waits, she meets the man’s wife, the author Madeleine L’Engle, who is surrounded by pillows proclaiming, oddly, “Making Love in 2002” and “Making Love in 1997.” As she waits, the narrator, a prospective author herself, thinks: “I looked at her tailored brown pants and realized he was probably making love to her right this second. When you reach a certain saturation point, lovemaking becomes one endless vibration. He was running late, and this was a way of making love to her, and she wanted to write but had to entertain me instead, and this was her way of making love to him.”

July also uses her characters’ erotic yearnings and actions to show how isolated they feel. In “The Shared Patio,” the narrator, in love with a married man, has a strangely intimate moment with him. When he becomes unconscious during an epileptic seizure, she falls asleep beside him and, in her dream, has a sexual interaction with him. The narrator of “Making Love in 2003” becomes a special-needs assistant in a school and gets sexually involved with a student. These stories are not sensational but poignant. In their tender, crooked march toward or away from their lovers, her characters elicit sympathy, not judgment.

July places the ordinary, human yearnings of her characters in an array of unusual situations; it is the pure and exquisite honesty of her voice that will make her readers feel understood. “How,” her characters ask us, “can I belong to you? Or you?” July has created a voice that is alive and winning and very funny as she struggles to answer their questions and, ultimately, ours. *