The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 28 November 2001
by Jeanette Winterson
Love and pain seem to go together. They certainly go together in most literature that touches on either one. Jeanette Winterson wonders why the measure of love is always loss. Indeed, loss and longing are so much a part of love and desire that they become intriguing and important elements of literature. Here, Winterson sets out on a romantic literary journey that has strong echoes of similar works of passion by Annie Ernaux, Carole Maso, and Marguerite Duras. So much so that the passionate exploration of love and sex by literary women authors almost seems a subgenre in itself. Winterson's narrator, whose gender remains ambiguous, is a lover of both women and men. He or she engages in liasons with several married women, and eventually becomes entangled with a woman for whom he or she feels deep passion. Winterson sets out describing several of the narrator's earlier affairs. There is passion, sex and even humor, but this reader ended up having a hard time detecting much love. Winterson's experiment with language is to constantly avoid the issue of the protagonist's gender. In this, she reveals, by its absence, the inherent gender tones of the English language. The book feels tremendously evasive as the author dances around this question. In the end, this evasiveness is evident in the character him or herself. She or he, evades responsibility and complicity in the destruction of so many married relationships. Whether Winterson is evading the ethical question, or merely suggesting that passion doesn't operate in an ethical realm is unclear. But it remains a distracting disservice to an otherwise well scripted tale of love and desire. In the end, merely because the author is a woman, one identifies the narrator as female. There are subtle linguistic clues to this along the way. But should the mystery of the lover's gender have so dominated the story? The speaker falls in love with a woman who is married to a distant and bitter doctor. His bitterness is inflamed by his wife's infidelity, and suggestions of his own peccadilloes do not entirely absolve the secret lovers from their sly behavior. The wife eventually is revealed to be suffering from a form of cancer and the man uses this to separate the lovers. The narrator's subsequent longing is well-told, and the book's ending is unusual. Yet Winterson's evasive story leaves much to be desired.