Virgin and Other Stories

Starred review from September 12, 2016
The five stories in Lawson’s superb debut collection explore youth in extremis, through voices at once
elegant in their phrasing and unrestrained in their emotion. In the title story, a young husband suspects his emotionally unavailable wife of infidelity, only to find himself tempted by the same at a society party. “The Way You Must Play Always” recalls the power dynamics of Carson McCullers’s “Wunderkind,” detailing a teenage piano student’s infatuation with her instructor’s sickly homebound brother. “Three Friends in a Hammock”
measures the growing interpersonal distances among three longtime friends who reunite at a birthday party. A boy wrestles with his mother’s complicated relationship with a recently deceased transgender woman in “The Negative Effects of Homeschooling,” and, in the collection’s longest and most freewheeling story, “Vulnerability,” a talented painter contemplates and eventually consummates an affair with a peculiar but charming art dealer. The precision of Lawson’s prose brilliantly contrasts with the messy inner lives of her characters. These are stories that dare to tread where they shouldn’t, on uncertain ground that feels, in the hands of this talented young writer, remarkably concrete. Agent: Rebecca Nagel, the Wylie Agency.

Debut collection limns a variety of troubled characters searching for solace of both sexual and spiritual varieties in the contemporary South.The title story investigates the frustrations of Jake, who learns after they marry that his young wife, Sheila, was manipulated into "heavy petting" by an uncle when she was 12 and then, when they were caught, blamed for it by her conservative Christian parents, who afterward considered their daughter damaged goods. Though this trauma seems to have permanently turned her off sex, Jake still fears that Sheila is cheating on him, while he is tempted by a wealthy cancer survivor who's a major donor to the hospital where he works. This is the first of several lurid scenarios that could have devolved into standard-issue Southern Gothic but instead convey compassion for Lawson's damaged protagonists in straightforward but sharply perceptive prose. Teenagers roiled by sexual desire drive the action in "The Way You Must Play Always" and "The Negative Effects of Homeschooling," and they are surrounded by adults equally confused and unhappy. Indeed, it might have made more thematic sense for the collection to take its name from "Vulnerability," the closing and longest piece; that title pinpoints an essential human quality on abundant display here. In that story, Lawson takes the first-person narrator, a painter, to New York to meet a famous artist and an art dealer who for all their sophistication are as needy as the husband she left back in her Southern hometown drinking scotch and watching porn in a backyard shed. Faltering marriages, uneasy connections to fundamentalist religious backgrounds, and the gray areas where powerful teenage sexuality meets adult desire in relationships that may or may not constitute abuse--these are among the recurrent subjects handled frankly yet with a delicate touch. Meaty, satisfying tales of a substance that suggests Lawson would make a fine novelist. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2016

In Lawson's lengthy closing piece, "Vulnerability," a young artist confesses to her dealer that the disturbing figures she draws or paints resemble the man who abused her as a child. Later, caught in a triangle with the dealer and the mysterious H., she muses on "men whose powers of observation and inner tension suffuse the air." That tension, that acute observation, that sense of damaged and damaging sexuality all suffuse Lawson's accomplished stories. In "The Way You Must Play Always," a teenager condemned to the rigors of piano lessons after being caught fooling around with her older cousin wreaks havoc when she boldly approaches her teacher's seriously ill brother. In the title piece, a Plimpton Prize winner actually somewhat less successful than the other tautly strung and full-bodied stories here, a woman abused as a child fears sex with her new husband. VERDICT For all fiction readers.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2016
This polished debut collection transforms ordinary settings and situations into desperate, strange, or perverse situations. With a touch of Southern gothic ambiance, Lawson's protagonists are damaged, deviant, and defiant inhabitants of a desire- and repression-filled world, where the forbidden lies behind closed doors, often literally, like the disease-ravaged brother in The Way You Must Play Always or the seductress-hostess in Virgin. Whether a jaded artist wife finds a peculiar connection with a lecherous art dealer or a hormone-raging, homeschooled teen takes issue with his mother's friendship with a transsexual, these stories delve into realms of vulnerability and variability. One moment, one choice can lead a person over the threshold from a known religious or moral structure into the off-balance or broken unknown. Lawson's stories feel oddly outside of time, as if they could be set in the present or decades ago. But then, time and setting are not primary; Lawson's unique curiosity and deft characterization propel the plots of her unusual stories and lure readers into voyeuristically witnessing unusual psychological, sexual, and emotional experiences and awakenings.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)