books

Andrea Lawlor's debut novel, first released by the tiny Rescue Press in 2017 before its Vintage and Picador reissues swept it into wider circulation, is one of the most singular coming-of-age books of the last decade. It is 1993. Paul Polydoris, 23, tends bar at the only gay club in Iowa City, studies queer theory, makes zines, and drifts between classes he barely attends and bedrooms he rarely leaves. He is also a shapeshifter, able to remould his body and gender at will, and he uses this ability to roam across a map of American queer subcultures - leather bars in Chicago, a lesbian commune in Provincetown, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, the bathhouses and squats of San Francisco - in what amounts to a picaresque tour of a vanished world.

What elevates the book far beyond its conceit is the texture of that world. Lawlor spent fifteen years writing it, and every page bears the evidence: the mixtapes, the thrifted band t-shirts, the specific grain of zine culture, the grunge lyrics quoting Maya Deren, the earnest graduate students with their Bersani and Berlant and Butler. The prose is taut, self-aware and carnal, and the novel is genuinely funny - Paul ranking his professors' stylishness by academic discipline, reading Foucault in a BDSM club, failing with real poignancy to pass as a drag queen when he needs rent money. Interspersed fables gesturing at Ovid, Tiresias and Woolf's Orlando give the book a mythic spine without ever tipping into solemnity.

Paul himself is the triumph. He is vain, selfish, avid, often a bad friend and a worse lover, and he is rendered with so much affection and specificity that none of that matters. His gender is never explained, the mechanics of his transformation are kept deliberately murky, and the pronouns stay "he" throughout even when he is living as Polly - a formal choice that does more serious work on identity than any number of essayistic asides could. The central section, in which Paul falls hard for a woman named Diane at the Michigan festival and must sustain a female form for longer than he ever has, is where the novel's emotional stakes finally catch up with its energy. It is also, tellingly, where the pace slows and the book becomes something sadder and more interesting than its opening suggests.

The novel is not without its flaws. The sheer volume of sex is, by design, relentless, and there is a fair case that the book's middle sags under its own cultural cataloguing - the riot grrrl, ACT UP and New Queer Cinema references accumulate thickly enough to feel like homework in places. Some of the secondary characters edge toward type. And the ending, which arrives in medias res, will frustrate anyone who wants resolution rather than a shrug towards the future.

None of this dents the achievement. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a joyous, filthy, tender and properly original book - a bildungsroman that takes gender, desire and the archive of 1990s queer life equally seriously, and trusts the reader to keep up. It deserves its growing reputation as one of the defining queer novels of its era.