You don't write a short story collection for the money or the glory. It's not there. Distressingly few people read them; only a few get even modest attention. For all the lamentation about fiction's dwindling readership, there have been great novels published in the last decade and some of them -- most notably, I'd argue, Edward P. Jones's majestic The Known World -- have even been richly rewarded. But short story collections (except, happily, those by the inimitable George Saunders) tend to go unnoticed by all but the aspiring-writer crowd, particularly if they're debut short story collections.

I guess what I'm saying is: Miranda July -- what the fuck?

Miranda July is some sort of performance artist and also a respected filmmaker (Me And You and Everyone We Know). A quick search of Google and IMDB makes it clear she is affiliated with the indie "tastemakers" of her generation -- people whose names show up in BOMB a lot or on, say, the masthead of The Believer. (She also, incidentally, gave a nice blurb to my former roommate, Tao Lin, whose writing I strongly recommend.) Anyway, sometime in the last six or eight months, I started seeing her name absolutely everywhere. Her highly entertaining website was forwarded around, Radar ran an interview, and two short stories appeared in The New Yorker. Her collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You, was coming out May 2007.

A story collection getting that much press? Getting a Radar piece? July seems "camera-ready" in a translucently emaciated, huge-eyed way, adopting a posture and gaze of utter helplessness in nearly every image one sees of her, but this didn't seem like mere cute-writer-hype -- or, worse a case of sheep-like hipsters just anointing, then worshiping, whoever's most Björk-like (see also: Audrey Tautou) -- so much as actual excitement about a new writer.

I was excited, too (a Saunders blurb even adorns her book jacket!), and the other day I finally picked up a copy of No One Belongs Here More Than You in Barnes & Noble. By the time I finished reading it, I was depressed. I just don't have a fucking clue how this stuff works. Why should this unmemorable collection have received so much more attention than did, say, Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, Alicia Erian's The Brutal Language of Love, or James Salter's Last Night -- all collections from recent years which evinced more skillful prose than July's, more sophisticated formal technique, and more nuanced and perceptive descriptions of how humans desire, deny, love, and harm one another?

(Incidentally, as I typed the title No One Belongs Here More Than You in the last paragraph, I thought: What's with the titular similarity to You Are Not A Stranger Here by Adam Haslett, the last real breakout debut collection that comes to mind? The themes of Haslett and July's books are pretty similar; maybe it's a deliberate reference? Haslett was, briefly, a professor of mine in 2003. I wonder what happened to him.)

July's stories aren't awful, they're just unremarkable -- stories that try to excuse with a weary-quirky tone the inertia at their core. There's nothing much there. The book is pervaded by a familiar and annoying sort of arch ennui ("There were empty rooms in the house where they had meant to put their love, and they worked together to fill these rooms with midcentury modern furniture.") that tries to make up for lack of memorable incident. No One Belongs Here More Than You aspires to the quality of a Lorrie Moore short story, a warm thing pretending to be cold. But though they have some good lines ("Poor people who win the lottery do not become rich people. They become poor people who won the lottery."), July's stories feel the opposite -- like cold things feigning warmth.

Why do many people swoon over this stuff? I feel like July's success depends a lot on her fans being bewitched by the aura of winsome self-pity and "indie" chic, regardless of artistic merit. In this sense she seems like a sort of female Zach Braff.

Wait -- I feel bad for saying that. Maybe I shouldn't have typed the words, just thought them in my head. But they make me laugh a little, so I'll leave them.

In this paragraph, though, I'll say some nice things. Miranda July has talent. I didn't hate any of her stories. I liked three. "I Kiss a Door" has a good title and is a deft, honestly affecting story about a girl, her female friend, and her female friend's father. (Two of those people have sex with each other.) "This Person" also felt genuine and made me laugh, especially the line, "Oh look, there's the doctor who prescribed the medicine that made this person temporarily blind." And "The Boy From Lam Kien," with its imaginary dog named Paul, is good (although it does have some forced lines like "He walked over to me, stood before me, did not judge me" that caused eye-rolling on my part).

But my opinion of the collection as a whole stands. I feel depressed when I think about this. It's not July's stories so much, or July herself. (The Underground Literary Alliance, those guys who protest what they see as the cronyism and inherited wealth in the New York literary establishment, smell blood because July comes from the Grossinger's Catskill Resort Hotel family -- but even the ULA acknowledges that "background and connections" shouldn't matter if the work is good.) It's the context -- the arbitrariness. I love short stories and read them voraciously, but No One Belongs Here More Than You just doesn't seem to me a particularly affecting or unusual collection. There have been so many better ones -- what happened to Adam Johnson's Emporium or Matthew Derby's Super Flat Times? Johnson's stories, like "Trauma Plate" and "Teen Sniper," have been stuck in my mind for years. July's are already fading.

I really do like her website, though.