All Fours

July's narrator sets out on a cross-country drive and gets no further than a motel twenty minutes from her house, where she spends her travel budget renovating a room and fixating on a younger man in a dynamic that stays technically, almost comically, short of an affair. The novel's frankness about perimenopausal desire and bodily change — including scenes involving blood, urine, and a suspected polyp that some readers found viscerally off-putting — is inseparable from its reception; what divides critics isn't the explicitness alone but the book's refusal to hand down judgment on the marriage or the choices, leaving readers to supply their own verdict. That refusal is what turned it into one of the most argued-over novels of its year rather than merely a well-reviewed one.