Book Review: Men as Virgins

Men as Virgins. A. Delaney Walker writing as Zola Lawrence. Argo & Cole Publishers, May 30, 2016, Trade Paperback, 482 pages.

Reviewed by Gerry Souter.

When I first thumbed through this book, I asked myself, “Why me?” Female readers appeared to have written all the review clips. The subject, “Men as Virgins,” seemed to refer to a hushed society that might limit the readership in this era of pre-teen sex exploration. No academic alphabet soup followed the author’s name so a “Masters and Johnson” spinoff appeared doubtful.

Then I realized that the author had gone spelunking into the messy world of the late 1960s through the 1980s—war-torn, politically volatile, and constantly perched on the edge of one revolution or another. 

Those were the times when I cut the ties that bound me to my Chicago roots and I ventured forth, brimming with art school insouciance, merchant seaman savvy, a degree in my pocket, and a camera in my hand. The author and I might have been fellow travelers, standing at the rail of the English Channel ferry. My curiosity kept me reading.

I was brought up short once again by Lawrence’s use of the second person. For all her assignations, narrative meanderings, and dialogue duets, she used “I said…you said.” This is an uncommon device. The book becomes one long, internal dialogue, unsparing in self-incrimination in which each of her lovers is shaped by her point of view and the reader assumes the identity of her hedonist focus.

And yet, I find her rich prose and insistent flow riveting. She is an animal of her era—those days of parsing the chaos to find some personal grab irons to cling to. With her own virginity in tatters following “true love” disappointments, she dives in and out of the turbulent currents of life in the 1970s and 80s like a dolphin, first to a career, then to college, then to selling encyclopedias door to door, and then back to school. Her cycles of lovers, with nine abstracted at periodic anchor points, are like punctuating ink crosses on a roadmap sketching geographic and emotional boundaries. Fascinated, I kept on reading.

After a while, with occasional lunges back to previous lovers, her story becomes a mantra of discovery, joy, clinging, disappointment, and recrimination only to plunge ahead in a sea of random couplings that defined an age. Finally, near the end of her saga, seated on a park bench in Paris, her mementoes—baubles, photos, letters of past victories and inevitable defeats—are “drowned in the River Seine.” She writes:

“I am a mad juggler, tossing lovers into the air, catching one with a thought, another with a heart string, keeping them all afloat until the movements become grotesque and my hands lose their quickness and my body its sanity, and I hold the fragments in my palms.”

Lawrence’s story sputters out quietly in the epilogue written 47 years after beginning her unwitting exploration of “Men as Virgins;” the energy of her writing in the insistent voice she chose is clear. During twenty years of world travel, I met some of the personality-types in her story, but from the opposite side of the chromosome fence and minus the surfeit of orgasmic interludes. She is a survivor and an author well worth reading, her book especially relevant for today’s millennials who can appreciate her dogged stamina and readers like me with “blue eyes flecked with brown and green” who can trace her path with their own memories. Her readers and I are richer for the experience.