Virgin and Other Stories
April Ayers Lawson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
April Ayers Lawson won the Paris Review’s prestigious Plimpton Prize (named for the magazine’s late founder and editor George Plimpton, and awarded to the best fiction from a first-time Review contributor) in 2011 for this book’s title story. The collection, Lawson’s debut, is comprised of ‘Virgin’ and five other stories that centre around sex, repression and the aftermath of abuse.
There is, unfortunately, little to distinguish these texts from the kind of modish story all too frequently published in the Paris Review. Lawson touches on big themes in ways too slight to reach the emotional depths she seems to be aiming for. Some areas may be too personal or painful to explore in depth, but at times there is a sense that Lawson is merely ticking boxes as regards subject matter and exposition. The stories draw heavily on fashionable MFA-style blurring of memoir and fiction, but only in ‘The Way You Must Play Always’ does the story’s design seem more than tentative; the narrator believable as a person and not an artificial character.
In the collection’s final story, ’Vulnerability’, however, the author goes too far in attempting to remedy pedestrian storytelling, tripping herself up in a muddle of tones, tenses and voices. Bar ‘The Way You Must Play…’, these narratives simply fade out, making this book seem more like a wasted opportunity than a promising beginning.
Words – Stephen Cox
