Isolation reading: Paul Takes The Form Of A Mortal Girl

Paul Takes The Form Of  A Mortal Girl
By Andrea Lawlor

Paul can shape-shift between man and woman, an Orlando in the 90s queer scene, always looking for a new thrill. But the shape-shifting twist doesn't define the story in Paul Takes The Form Of  A Mortal Girl at all, which is as undefinable as the main character's gender.

At first, Paul's just another disappointing fuckpig, just another dumb boy in his early twenties - possibly the most arrogant and dumb age for anybody - sizing up everybody and fucking his way through life, oblivious to the carnage left behind. He's the kind of guy that takes acid and spends four pages expounding on his grand theory of gay music as seen through gender-switched covers, which is just as irritating as it sounds.

But then the book shifts, and Paul tries to settle down as a working-class lesbian, and when rejected from that life, goes and becomes the absolute cliche of a gay man in San Francisco and takes that all the way, and even finds a reflection of himself (and he's always a he, even when he takes on a woman's form).

Paul's story really comes into its own with the gritty details of setting up a new life in a new city, and becomes a lot more identifiable as a stranger in a strange city, watching his meager savings quickly dry up, and it certainly works a lot better than the pieces of harmless fairy tale nonsense spread throughout the book (it's little surprise that Paul is a big fan of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic...)

The novel does try a bit hard, that music rant goes on too long, especially when somebody is listening to it in apparently genuine awe, and there is a bit towards the end when Paul spends more pages remembering all the mundane details of his life with a character who has just died after lurking in the background of his story, which doesn't pay off at all.

But the book also never overpays the gender-swap stuff. Paul uses it to delight friends and run away into new lives, but it never becomes a major plot point. He never uses it to pull off a heist or murder a rival or anything like that. It's the kind of restraint that Paul himself would probably sneer at, but a fuckpig would always think that.