VIRGIN IN THE GYM AND
OTHER STORIES
In this, her second collection of short stories, Perriam casts a candid eye on the foibles and neuroses of contemporary society. Many of her characters are living on a cliff-edge, prey to wild obsessions and guilt-edged insecurities, or struggling between doubt and faith, submission and revolt.Passion features in all its forms, from religious devotion to devotionless sex, and the darker side of love and sex is presented with startling honesty. Yet humour is never far away as Perriam probes the peaks and troughs of human hopes and desires, combining a talent for social satire with a deep compassion for her quirky cast of characters.
Witty and wicked by turn, this collection will leave the reader unsettled but exhilarated.
Reviews of "Virgin in the Gym and other stories"
Wendy Perriam must be one of the most underrated writers in the country. You never see her riding high in the best-seller lists or walking off with literary prizes. But in an oeuvre of nearly 20 books, she has proved a consistently sharp chronicler of modern Britain. She is also an extremely entertaining storyteller.
The 20-odd tales that make up "Virgin in the Gym" are as crisply delivered as they are elegantly structured. The best of the stories are models of the form, bringing humdrum lives into brilliant focus as events take an unexpected twist. The possibility of redemption runs through the book like a thread of good-class tweed. Nobody is too old to learn new tricks; indeed, some of the most touching stories feature people in the twilight of their years being granted a miraculous epiphany.
In "William", a woman of 93 gets a new lease of life when stopped in the street by a man doing a dog-food survey. She is so flattered by the attention that she pretends to be the owner of a golden retriever. In "Away-Day", a trip to the seaside is transformed when an octogenarian visits a guess-your-age booth.
Life also takes a turn for the better for many of the younger characters. An embittered divorcee is the beneficiary of an embarrassing misunderstanding in a hotel room. A widow visits an apparently fraudulent clairvoyant and gets a pleasant surprise in the upstairs bathroom. A nude model realises that, far from being exploited, she is the centre of artistic attention. The child of a broken home disgraces herself, then finds herself, on a botany field-trip.
If the overall mood of the book is upbeat, Perriam does not dole out happy endings indiscriminately. One of the most effective stories is "Heart to Heart", a black comedy about a woman responding to a lonely-hearts ad in a newspaper. Not only does Sensitive and Lonely Gentleman turn out to be scruffy, paunchy and unemployed: he is an out-and-out infantilist, still traumatised by the death of his mother when he was three; his idea of a hot date is having a woman put him in nappies and burp him. As so often with Perriam – and this is a large part of her appeal – you do not know whether to laugh or cry.
Sunday Telegraph
Wendy Perriam is an author of whom one becomes progressively more fond, and it is nice to see that her critical reputation is growing. These 21 short stories confirm her as both clever and funny, as well as being a skilled artist with something to say about life.
If these stories have a common theme, it is that of transformation, the way we can redeem our lives by seeing them as part of another narrative. Of course, this also works in another direction too. Sometimes the only way to transform our lives is to jump off a high building. But even suicide is in its way positive, an alternative to living death. For the most part, Perriam’s characters live in drab worlds, but she offers them all the possibility of escape, even if it is sometimes the escape into madness. The redemptive streak to her writing may have something to do with her Catholic upbringing. The author’s blurb tells us that she was expelled from her convent school for heresy: one would like to know what heresy. But whatever her beliefs, this book shows her to be essentially kind hearted, even when writing about murder, selfishness and death. This is an author who has learned how to face the world and tame the horrors of life: we should be grateful for her optimism – it is infectious. Perriam is such a good writer, and this collection of short stories will offer a useful way in to her longer fiction for the uninitiated.
The Tablet
In this intriguing collection of short stories, Wendy Perriam gives a sharp insight into the private and often screwed-up lives of a host of quirky women, revealing fantasies that should remain secret and exposing every foible. Plunging readers immediately into a world that every woman can identify with on some level, Perriam is both witty and wicked. Her cutting observations bring into sharp relief the fears, insecurities and passions of her oddball characters and while every tale is tinged with sadness, there are moments of triumph and enlightenment.
Angry, frustrated, desperate, confused, even proud, they may be deluding themselves, but the truth is laid out for all to see in the detail, the trivia.
Thoroughly absorbing, but easy to digest, "Virgin in the Gym – and Other Stories" is a feast of fantasy that will disgust, amuse, and provoke in equal measure.
Perriam takes her readers on a journey in someone else’s shoes, before promptly discarding them, leaving them to question their own failures and successes in life.
Pick it up and take a look into another world – one that is just a little bit too familiar.
The Informer
In her 15 novels, Wendy Perriam usually manages to shock, disturb and even make you laugh aloud at times, but it is in this, her second short-story collection, that she should prove to even her strongest critics why she continues to be one of the most talented and sadly, too often unappreciated, writers of her generation.
Passion well-hidden features in all 21 short stories. Her characters are all living on the knife-edge of life as they try to survive their daily lives. From religious obsession to the obsession of love, each story is filled with poignancy and warmth. Perriam’s characters are real to her and to you, the kind of people we pass on the street and barely see. She describes the ups and downs of life with a sensitivity and understanding that is very much part of the person she is. I can understand why Fay Weldon describes herself as Perriam’s greatest fan.
The American Issue
The boundary between imagination and everyday reality may be flexible and porous, but most of us, most of the time, work on the assumption that a boundary exists and we succeed in defining it in a way that allows us to get on with our lives. What happens though if, under life’s stresses and exigencies, we can no longer distinguish boundaries: if short story becomes reality? This is the question Wendy Perriam explores so perceptively in "Virgin in the Gym and Other Stories".
Readers of Perriam’s earlier novels will be familiar with her deep humanity and wicked wit. In this collection of stories she trains her sensitive eye on a cast of characters who, varied as they are, share a dangerous vulnerability, mental instability that topples them into fantasies that sometimes may be healing, but more often do harm.
Sometimes the obsession arises from the longings and insecurities of sex. When Rowan decides to impress her office colleagues by faking a holiday complete with lover, along with her tan, her romantic imaginings seem comical but harmless enough, indeed therapeutic in view of her crushing claustrophobic home life. In another story, where Beth is forced to encounter her ex husband and his new wife, the unbearable pain of sexual jealousy threatens to destroy them all.
Perriam also explores the no man’s land around belief and unbelief. In “One Million Rosaries” an old woman’s delusions, inflated by thwarted desire, lead her to religious mania. In another, doubt is routed (delusion again?) when the grieving Carla consults Madam Martinez, most unpromising of clairvoyants. “No Room at the Inn” tells the tale of an oppressed wife whose meeting with a “surprisingly refined” beggar prompts her to a brave act of Christmas charity towards a decidedly unrefined down and out. “Could he be a sort of Christ figure, come again, and hoping this time there might be room in the inn?” she muses.
Fans of Perriam’s writing will be glad to recognise some welcome trademarks, and at this point I should issue a health warning. Maybe it's best not to read this book when you’re feeling hungry because, as usual, there are descriptions of food on practically every page, dripping with sensuous detail. She uses food, its look and texture, taste and smell and feel, not as mere scene dressing, but, transformed by the imagination of her characters, almost as an extra protagonist in a scene.
From confined to untrammelled. That perhaps sums up the journey Perriam takes us on throughout this collection. In these stories, confinement is a pressure cooker where restrictions of all kinds – age, mental frustration, loss of love, loss of control and feelings of helplessness – force each character beyond the bounds of behaviour generally regarded as safe or “normal”. As we have seen, this sometimes leads to freedom but in other cases it ends in desperation and the disintegration of personality.
Under the pressure and stresses of modern life, most of us have looked into the abyss at some time. Maybe some of us have succumbed to living our fantasies for a while to make reality more bearable. The point is though, most of us recognise the fantasies for what they are, stories that we create and control, so they don’t take over our lives. But as Perriam shows, for the vulnerable it may not be so easy.
Sea of Faith Magazine
Wendy Perriam talks about "Virgin in the Gym and other stories"
"As with my first short story collection, "Dreams, Demons and Desire", I found these stories wonderfully liberating to write. Instead of the constraining and complex structure of a novel, I could use a tiny incident as a springboard and see where it took me – sometimes surprising myself in the process.
For example, a “Let Me Guess Your Age” booth near Bournemouth pier catapulted me into a story about a 93-year-old escapee from a geriatric nursing home, still hoping for romance! And a market researcher’s innocent question, “Are you a dog-owner, Madam?”, led me into the dark waters of a dog-hating, daughter-neglecting father.
Other stories in this collection sprang from sources as diverse as a psychic’s advert in the local paper to a self-important budgie in a cage. And often these random occurrences would trigger my underlying obsessions as a writer – the conflict between duty and hedonism and between submission and murderous rage; the strange secrets of the bedroom; the sometimes perilously inadequate communication between friends, partners or spouses.
Some of the stories are based on incidents in my own life. “Life Class”, for example, draws on my long-ago experience of being a life model for an artist. At the time, he was working on the portrait of an eminent Bishop, and while I sprawled naked on a velvet-covered couch, the shocked eyes of the painted Man of God glared at me from the easel.
Another story, “Mantra”, resulted from an encounter with a New Age masseur who, while pummelling (punishing) my spine, enthused to me in Sanskrit about the wonders of Tibet. The woman in the story is actually encouraged to travel to Tibet herself. But I have to confess that far from following her example, I’m more akin to the character in “Hols” – so full of fears that she’s forced to journey only in her mind.
A strong influence on my recent writing was the six weeks I spent as a patient in a geriatric nursing home, following a botched operation – the starting point for my latest novel, "Tread Softly". That extraordinary period living as a comparatively young ‘intruder’ in a community of octogenarians and nonagenarians seems to have affected me deeply, and led me to create several doughty 90-year-olds in my new short-story collection. The elderly, I feel, have had a raw deal in fiction, being either ignored or depicted as dopey dodderers. Those in my stories are rebels and goers.
At the other extreme, I’m also interested in writing about childhood, whether happy, as in “Best Friends”, threatened, as in “The Eighth Wonder of the World”, or traumatic, as in “Sweeties”. Yet even when I was describing a child’s trauma or a friend’s betrayal, I still felt a sense of pleasure in having been released from my novelist’s straitjacket and given permission to roam free."
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