Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor

 

‘Like a shark, Paul had to keep moving.’

‘He enjoyed his various reputations (freak, party boy, bisexual, New Yorker) and liked to keep them fresh, but his badness was incidental, really.’

So opens Andrea Lawlor’s thought-provoking, exhilarating, at times heart-breaking and frequently hilarious story – a story I didn’t expect even to like, let alone love. But I enjoyed every minute of this rollercoaster ride through the life of Paul Polydoris, a 20 year old student in 1990s America.

Paul is impetuous, unreliable, self-centered, image-obsessed, terrified of missing out, and an expert at justifying anything he wants to do. He’s also vulnerable, loving, persistent, resourceful and – unintentionally – often very funny.

And he’s also a shape-shifter; he can change from male to female just by thinking about it. I thought this would irritate me no end, but I soon came to see what a brilliant device it was, and how well it helps us to understand so much about gender, sexuality, and society in general.

We first meet Paul in Iowa City of all places. He has left New York to study. This is a smart move on Lawlor’s part; this isn’t just another novel about a hip place that few of us have been to – it’s Midwest America, and what do we mostly think when we hear those words? But Paul seeks out the different, the subversive, the cool, the fun; it can be found anywhere if you know where to look. And Paul certainly does.

Together with his friend Jane, Paul frequents the city’s gay bar, cool coffee shops, zine stores, clubs and cinemas. As a man or as a woman, he’s always looking for sex and frequently finds it; be warned that the book is full of it, though I didn’t find it at all gratuitous – it’s part of Paul’s life. He wants to meet cool people, to be like them – but that rarely works out. His money-making ideas are never successful (he has almost no cash, and what he does have he can’t resist spending.) He works in a bar, and later in a bookshop, mainly for the money but also to find his people;

‘A bookstore was really no different from a bar, Paul thought when he arrived, ten minutes before anyone else scheduled for the night shift. More public, better lit, but the same seaside question of what might wash up today……Paul liked the late shift well enough; nights often meant readings, and readings were efficient: anyone attractive was almost guaranteed to be smart and interesting, and anyone old enough to be unattractive might be famous.’

(Whether you like Paul’s story or not, it’s worth reading simply for Lawlor’s wonderful writing, their brilliant, illuminating use of language;

‘..the phone rang, knifed open the tent of the moment..’

‘His skin was electric, buzzing, humming like drugs, like fear, like New York City sidewalks…’)

And then, in the middle of all these one-night stands and frenetic thrill-seeking, Paul meets Diane. Except the meeting takes place at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, where he’s gone with Jane. And he’s gone there as Polly.

‘”Do I look dykey enough?” he asked.

“You’ll do,” said Jane, who had given herself a flapper haircut before they left and was currently lipsticking an extra long cigarette-holder….

"Do I look like a tasty morsel for one of those hot San Francisco butches?”

“Um,” said Paul. “Sure.”’

 

1996 Michigan Womyn's Festival poster (Ann Arbor District Library)

Lawlor completely nails the vibe of the festival; at times it is laugh-out-loud funny (reminding me of 'The Lesbians' in Pride.) At times, however, we see Paul/Polly starting to realise the downsides of being a woman.

‘(Jane) was still his friend; she wasn’t a Stepford lesbian just because they were at Michigan and she had all this secret knowledge of tents.’

‘Paul felt like a time traveler, a tourist at a gay reenactment – Hidden-From-History Town.’

Provincetown today - image (c) Gay Travel

When the festival is over, Jane and Paul go back to Iowa – but Paul is restless, and soon he’s on another road trip, partly looking for Diane, partly just looking for kicks. So Lawlor takes us to Provincetown, where Diane is living in a women’s collective;

‘Provincetown in winter did not look so very gay, Paul thought. How different was it, really, from any closed-up New England beach town?’

But Provincetown is where Diane is, and at first this is almost enough;

The Clash: Combat Rock

‘Diane was as fascinatingly blank as any man. And as frustrating. A shiny reflective surface and Paul a magpie….Diane was Combat Rock, she was a song building, she was – what was that? A fuzzbox – she was Albertine, a tiger’s paw, a marble faun in a pocket garden, a whiskey sour, a traffic light turning red at twilight.’

Eventually, Paul moves on (though this time it might be more accurate to say he is moved on) and his next stop is, perhaps inevitably, San Francisco. Though even then he rocks up at the wrong place:

‘Emeryville, as it turned out, was not San Francisco.’

More adventures, more hustle, more close shaves, more fun.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl drips with cultural references, but they never feel forced or superfluous. So many writers throw in the titles of books or songs, the names of cars or clothes, in such a heavy-handed way that the reader wants to scream ‘OK! I get it! It’s 1960s London/1950s Paris/1920s Chicago. Stop!’ Lawlor, however, has such a light and skilful touch that every signpost is part of the story, every single word fits.

X-Ray Spex

There are, of course lots of references to film (Paris is Burning, Some Like it Hot, Strangers On A Train, Orlando), one of Paul’s obsessions, and the most interesting part of his college course, music (he makes [and agonises over] mixtapes to send to Diane – Patti Smith, X-Ray Spex, The Cramps, Bowie, Dolly Parton….), fashion, drinks and books. Lawlor uses them to ground us in Paul’s world.

'Our hot mess of an antihero' (Katie Goh, The Skinny, April 2019)

He’s superficial, he’s impressionable, he’s inconsistent, he’s easily bored, but he’s also tuned to the zeitgeist, alive to every possibility, wired, never boring. He embraces life.

I think that, for me, a good book needs four things; an absorbing plot, a window on lives different from our own, sublime, luminous, writing, and most of all, characters – or at least one character – with whom we identify. I am not American, nor am I a student, twenty years old, male, bisexual, nor indeed a shape shifter – but in Paul, Lawlor has created someone whose hopes, dreams, fears, successes, failures, vulnerabilities - even his bad behaviour - strike a chord with us all.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a masterpiece.

‘He came to Dubcoe Park and lay down on the grass, his head on his backpack and his fingers in the dirt…..He saw the counter girl from Flore, reading a paperback copy of A Wizard of Earthsea on a bench. He saw a violet pushing up through a disintegrating Muni transfer. He saw the city, as good-smelling and various as himself.’

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor is published by Picador. Thanks to Old Aberdeen Library for stocking a copy.