Andrea Lawlor’s debut novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a celebration of being young and queer. The protagonist, a young man called Paul who can shapeshift his body at will, is by turns enthusiastic, desirous, hungry for experience, then unsure of himself and heartbroken.
The book, like its main character, eschews definition for something much more playful
As Paul moves from Iowa City, to Michigan’s Womyn Festival, to Providence and then to San Francisco, the novel plots his thirst for the new: “he was locomotive with desire for more more more”. Lawlor (who uses the pronoun they/their) celebrates queer communities and subcultures of the 1990s without creating a novel that feels like an exercise in nostalgia. Instead, their writing is imbued with a deep sense of the excitement of self-discovery in its representation of young queer people navigating the possibility of identity.
The book, like its main character, eschews definition for something much more playful. Though it replicates in some way the bildungsroman form, or even the künstlerroman, the birth of the artist, the “journeying” that Paul takes is not so much one of enlightenment or greater knowledge, but through different queer communities, different forms of sexual and intimate relationships, and the myriad possibilities of his shapeshifting form.
Though the novel is written using male pronouns throughout, Paul is able to completely transform his body, at times becoming Polly. These changes are sometimes playful, allowing him to become more muscular when he attends a leather bar or softening his features when he wants to impress a girl. At other moments, he totally transforms: though he opens the novel as a gay man, later, as Polly, he enters into a loving lesbian relationship with Diane. In a playful touch, the wider narrative is intercut with shorter scenes in which Lawlor incorporates stories in the style of myths and fairy tales as if to “explain” how Paul came to being – when of course, there is no explanation needed for Paul.
When the novel comes to rest on the final word, “himself”, Lawlor does not posit that at some point Paul will decide upon a “version” of himself: it is his fluidity that defines him.
This fluidity is also reflected in Paul’s (sometimes insatiable) sexual desire. His relationship with sex is complex, and at times his night-time wanderings are exhausting for both him and for us, the reader. However, Lawlor’s work is interesting here as it seems to suggest that Paul’s desire feeds itself: the more he has, the more he wants. His roving eye often changes its focus: as Paul dresses at the beginning of the novel, he announces: “Who was he? He was Ginsberg and Streisand and Kim Gordon rolled into one. He was the girl he wanted to fuck.”
Sexual encounters
Lawlor demonstrates that desire is not only about others but also a reflection of oneself and in Paul’s wide variety of sexual encounters, it seems that his search for more love and more pleasure reflects his ever-changing needs and wants.
Lawlor’s novel is also deeply in conversation with culture, theory and philosophy, and shows how much queer communities and activism were borne from a strong desire for thinking that posited new modes of being.
As well as important figures who revolutionised theory such as Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, and Lauren Berlant – all name-checked in this book – Paul seemingly absorbs and incorporates culture as a mode of living: in one paragraph his thoughts range from the films of Fassbinder, the roles of Jeanne Moreau, Jean Genet and River Phoenix, as he appears fascinated by their aesthetic as well as their work. The writer and their protagonist clearly think literature, film and reading are cool, and show that theory, which the general reading public is often quick to disregard, can be fun.
Though the novel only briefly mentions Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, it is clearly in conversation with the text through their shared shapeshifting protagonist. Lawlor’s other key reference is the classical myth of Tiresias, who in some accounts was transformed into a woman for several years. But though those texts may inform the novel as a whole, Lawlor name-checks many other works such as The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall and Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, paying homage and providing a large reading list that could arguably form the basis for a trans and queer canon.
Lawlor’s novel shows that, like activism and subcultures, literature also fosters a powerful and important community.
