"Here is Cheryl, a tightly-wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat. She is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other people's babies. Cheryl is also obsessed with Phillip, a ...

NUBClub did not get this book. July is clearly trying to paint a complex and conflict view of relationships here. The arc of Cheryl's romantic life -- her crush on Phil and his subsequent depravity, her violent but consensual relationship with Clee -- are all supposed to make us uncomfortable and challenge our notions of what is acceptable and beautiful in sex and relationships. And we suppose that did happen to some extent. The physical descriptions were often disgusting (in the case of Clee's hygiene) or disturbing (in the graphic violence in Cheryl's home), and we certainly couldn't say that we liked the relationships. But whatever interesting complexity this created was completely undermined for us by July's painfully stilted style and constant attempts to be clever. It's not that the style never worked -- many of us could pull out individual descriptions or moves from the novel that we thought were great. But just as many of us hated each example, and all of us found it exhausting to try to follow Cheryl's story in that voice. We all essentially felt very distant from the story, and every time we felt we found something to connect to in the writing, the next weird impulse of July's would leave us cold. We really didn't even talk much about the complexities of the relationships in our meeting -- nobody cared enough about Cheryl or the story to really dig into them. Ultimately, the book kind of just went the way we thought it would, so for all the flourishes, it was kind of a simple plot dressed up in an affected and off-putting style. Unfortunately, that combination didn't work for us. There are great moments in the The First Bad Man, but it's way too stiff and ornamented and oddly too thin to make a compelling read.