Andrea Lawlor - Paul Takes The Form Of A Mortal Girl

I chased this down as soon as it came into paperback. The hunt was on for the "New Transgender Fiction”. The “old transgender fiction” was still great – “Orlando”, Myra Breckinridge”, - but there was a wave to be ridden here, a 21st Century near-tsunami , of public attention to trans, generating new scenarios and experiences which cried out to be captured. Who would get the measure of it all? Word is that Andrea Lawlor took some time to get this book together and it does feel strangely out-of-time. Set in an era - the year is 1993, and the book was published in 2017 – when AIDS was a fact of life. It was also a period of pre-digital innocence – the book is like an endless shopping trip, (“if you enjoyed “Slaves of New York” you’ll enjoy……”), a smorgasbord of life-style references – so here you can find cassettes, payphones, landlines, vinyl records, - and I began to wonder if it was that moment, on the cusp of our spoiled, painfully self-aware present, which attracted the author as the setting for their story. I admit that I was also attracted to the book by the idea of it as a picaresque novel. Now I have some form on the picaresque having, in a previous existence in the form of a mortal student, read most of the classic picaresque novels, the “Moll Flanders” and the “Roderick Randoms”, et al, and having enjoyed in the best of them the ripe reviews of contemporary society in all of its classes and levels and locations. I think I may even have written one. Paul, the protagonist of this book, does travel around a bit, but not that much, exposing at least the world of “gay” along the way. In fact, a lot of American fiction is mixing together gender identity and sexual orientation, maybe to give trans, which is to date a unified forward narrative, the complexities of same-sex desire. Not forgetting, of course, here, a dimension of style-alertness which verges on snobbery and a kind of wet-dream of polyamory. Anyway there’s a better term for “Paul Takes On…” and that is “Bildungsroman” (another subset of fiction I seem to have taken on in my time), the novels which make epics of personal and intellectual and emotional growth. For all that the span of Paul’s life is a bit too short to match that of the big German books and, if we’re honest, doesn’t involve that much growth. Maybe the best reference is “magic realism”. Paul does after all shape-shift a lot, and if you are starting with a view of trans as a kind of disguise to hide from all of the boring and apparently dimensionless features of the present then you will love his facility for “becoming”. It’s like a magic carpet ride into other lives and others’ bodies. It has been described, without irony, as a fairy-story. It’s all about tricks, including all the willed transformations, but a “trick” is also a term in prostitution, and “Paul Takes On….” offers a lot of body-count per chapter, which may in its explicit way be what the old trans fiction was waiting to do next – maybe. It is about fluidity but sometimes it verges on body-fascism with its judgements on other bodies than Paul’s “smart” physicality. Despite the contortions and strains which Paul puts it through – if not quite super-hero transformations – his body is labile enough, almost unruinable. This is of course the dream of youth, the immortality wish, - the great immature wish - and the problem with it, fairy-tale or not, is that things which can’t change can’t grow. Which is why – and this is a problem with picaresque if not bildungsroman – the only way to conclude the story is by casting off the fluidity, as if it was a snake’s skin, something you grew out of. Paul has to decide if he wants to go on playing for tricks, - and can’t really, decide that is. Is this what gender-fluidity, as we now understand it, is about? Just a phase he was going through? Or is fluidity, and trans generally, some newly re-uncovered dimension of human existence which has been called up to respond to an almost global crisis of self-understanding? If I say the latter you will think I’m delusionary or some kind of mad, but I think that’s what fiction (or some kind of storying in some medium) needs to be to carry us forward as trans. Paul travels across the body of the U.S.A. – the East, West and Middle-sexes – but what does he learn? Does he actually grow up? get wiser? open up to the reality of Others? In the America of the 90’s there were struggles afoot in the wider community and strivings in the LGBT community. It wasn’t the incendiary politics of the 60’s and the early 70’s but it was politics nonetheless. His boyfriend, Tony Pinto, dies – what does he die from? This is, as I say, the historical landscape of AIDS. How seriously does risk and loss get addressed? If you can read it for fun, in admiration of its style, its formal tricksiness, its post-modern insertions, as a period novel almost oblivious to history, then you should make its acquaintance. Since we don’t have that much trans fiction yet (but one day may not need trans-fiction at all as our reality will not require that category) it’s worth reading anyway. But if one version of the key question can be – Is trans a choice, an inclination or a destiny? “Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl” offers too few answers.