All Fours by Miranda July
Published 2025 · 400 pages · 100,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is All Fours to read?
All Fours scores 46 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 35 out of 100
- Contemporary American prose, direct and immediate.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Flowing sentences following consciousness.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Questions of desire, aging, and marriage.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Dense with psychological and emotional content.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Narrator's journey of self-discovery unfolds gradually.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The motel, the affair, the road carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- July maintains knowing distance from narrator.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Transformation continues; future uncertain.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- First-person narrative with temporal shifts.
How All Fours is regarded
All Fours holds a literary regard score of 61 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.