[In the following review, Petro praises Winterson's prose in Written on the Body, comparing it to Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Sexing the Cherry, and The Passion.]

The narrator of Jeanette Winterson's new novel, Written on the Body, once had a girlfriend “who thought it rude to wear shorts in front of public monuments.” The same narrator also had a boyfriend named Bruno who found Jesus under a wardrobe. Considering some of Jeanette Winterson's earlier creations, from a beautiful Venetian croupier with webbed feet to an evangelical child preacher with lesbian inclinations—not to forget the seventeenth-century giantess known as the Dog-Woman—her new narrator runs with pretty tame company. This is not to say that Written on the Body is a tame novel. Winterson has always been a sorceress with language; her slim books are packed with the stuff of speech and reflection in pure, concentrated form, undiluted with extraneous modifiers and unbothered by pleasantries like transitions. It takes courage to write with clear, unequivocal beauty, as if one's story laid bare the universal truths of fairy tales, and Jeanette Winterson has been much rewarded for her valor (perhaps this is the courage of youth, since she is only thirty-four years old). With the exception of Boating for Beginners (1985), a coming-of-age tale set amid Noah's preparations for the flood, which is no longer listed among her works, each of her previous publications has attracted an impressive kite-tail of awards and comments, including Gore Vidal's oft-quoted declaration that Winterson is “the most interesting young writer I have read in twenty years.” Written on the Body is the best evidence yet to support Vidal's claim.

Winterson's earlier novels include Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1987), which she adapted for BBC television, The Passion (1988), and Sexing the Cherry (1990). In a written interview she claimed bluntly that “the story is nothing, the language is everything.” And indeed it is the exceptional quality of her prose, coupled with a subversively erotic appreciation of the elasticity of gender, that links these highly idiosyncratic books—though readers might be apt to disagree with her about their plots, which reveal a quirky, compassionate, and erudite imagination at play. Although the sheer poetic drive of Winterson's writing can sometimes overwhelm her narrative, muscling the reader out of the story into admiration for how well she tells it, the language of Written on the Body cleaves like a lover to its tale. Much of the book is addressed in absentia to Louise, the narrator's true, lost love, binding voice and story in a relationship as mutual and intense as that between the characters.

What is written on the body in question is memories of a smorgasbord-style love life. The narrator, whose name and sex are never stated, is a recovering romantic getting over a quest for the “never-sleep non-stop mighty orgasm.” Like a randy picaresque artist, he or she often punctuates the central story with recollections of former lovers, nine women and three men in all. There is Inge, the Dutch “anarcha-feminist” who insisted on communicating by carrier pigeon; Bathsheba, the married dentist; a woman who refused to make love on beds; and Crazy Frank, the six-foot son of midgets.

Having done with all this, the narrator settles down with Jacqueline, a nice girl who works with disturbed animals at the zoo. But their menage proves a bit too safe, and is easily disrupted when Louise comes along. Louise is the sun at whom the narrator has looked long and without protection—less a character than a dazzling afterimage with red hair and an Australian accent. When the narrator first meets her, Louise is married to Elgin, a dull if brilliant oncologist from whom the narrator eventually learns that Louise has leukemia. Believing that it is the only way to save Louise's life, the narrator secretly exiles herself or himself to the north of England, in hopes that Louise will decide to stay with the man who might make her well.

After the narrator's departure Louise's actual death becomes a moot point; to save his or her own sanity, as well as retain the reader's interest, the narrator must translate Louise from the realm of flesh and blood into that of language and memory (it's no coincidence that the narrator works as a translator of Russian novels). Winterson accomplishes this in a disarmingly literal way, interrupting the narrative with an onslaught of visceral memories that are prompted by a medical manual. The narrator explains:

If I could not put Louise out of my mind I would drown myself in her. Within the clinical language, through the dispassionate view of the sucking, sweating, greedy, defecating self, I found a love-poem to Louise. I would go on knowing her, more intimately than the skin, hair and voice that I craved. I would have her plasma, her spleen, her synovial fluid. I would recognise her even when her body had long since fallen away.

In hardcover the figurative remembering of Louise takes about twenty-five pages. It marks the text like a loving headstone, asking the reader to pause in respect before moving on with the narrator's life in exile, at a fancy Yorkshire wine bar called A Touch of Southern Comfort.

The sudden shifting of narrative gears is one of Jeanette Winterson's trademarks. In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit the comic and harrowing upbringing of the young narrator is suspended from time to time by short fairy tales (of Winterson's invention) that serve as allegories for her passage into adulthood. This technique gets its most baroque and ambitious treatment in Sexing the Cherry. The novel is a veritable postmodern melting pot of narrative voices and modes, related by the gigantic Dog-Woman, a Royalist avenger in the slums of seventeenth-century London, and her adopted son, Jordan, whose own stories are interspersed with those of fairy-tale figures like the Twelve Dancing Princesses.

Sexing the Cherry plays games with time and—like all of Winterson's work—sexuality. Jordan is a naturalist and a traveler who experiences time as if it were curved like the earth, on a quest for a woman “whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt.” His mother raises dogs and murders Puritans. Threaded through their historical world are incidents of magic realism: Jordan ascends above London with a team of cleaners who scrub conversations from the sky to prevent London from being smothered by language. He surreptitiously takes home a sonnet in a wooden box as a souvenir.

Although each passage is thoroughly imagined and exquisitely written—startling, in fact, in its originality—Sexing the Cherry seems an imperfect juggling act: it lacks the integration that Written on the Body achieves through driven, single-minded narration. And pervasive humor. Winterson's newest novel is also her funniest since Oranges, with which it also shares an intimate knowledge of the undertaking business.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit tells the story of another foundling, named Jeanette (although she bestowed her own name upon the heroine, Winterson claims the story isn't autobiographical), who is raised to become an evangelical missionary by her adoptive mother, a formidable follower of a fundamentalist Christian sect in northern England. As a child Jeanette suffers endless indignities at the hands of a heathen world. In sewing class she is asked to make a sampler.

“What about suffer little children?” suggested Mrs. Virtue.

I knew this wouldn't do for Elsie. She liked the prophets.

“No,” I said firmly … “I was thinking of the summer is ended and we are not yet saved.”

Mrs. Virtue was a diplomatic woman but she had her blind spots. When it came to listing all the samplers, she wrote the others out in full, and next to mine put “Text.”

As Jeanette grows older, she begins to realize that Unnatural Passions are not chemicals put in candy but feelings like those she experiences for other women. Needless to say, this wrecks the plans for her ministry, and it occasions not only a spectacular (unsuccessful) exorcism but also her eventual liberation. Undercurrents of sexual ambiguity turn up throughout Jeanette Winterson's writing. Jordan tries his hand at cross-dressing in Sexing the Cherry, but it is Villanelle, the web-footed heroine of The Passion, who is Winterson's foremost magician of gender.

Villanelle works in a Venetian casino, where sexuality is the stuff of wagers and craft: “I dressed as a boy because that's what the visitors liked to see. It was part of the game. …” She falls in love with a beautiful female patron but gambles her freedom and loses, winding up in Russia in the Zero Winter of 1812, where she meets Henri, a cook in Napoleon's army, who co-narrates the book. The Passion is a fascinating mixture of historical verisimilitude—evoked with a few deft strokes rather than with the usual baggage of dates and details—and magic realism. Villanelle's heart, for example, is literally stolen by her lover; a gold chain is preserved inside an icicle throughout the Venetian summer. The combination works because it is filtered through language at once serious and stately, carving out a unique literary niche somewhere between fiction and myth.

Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness.

We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not.

You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.

Written on the Body lacks the romantic high seriousness of The Passion. Winterson has toned down her penchant for magic realism and has turned her feminist fairy stories into shaggy-dog tales of domestic life. These temper the narrator's passion for Louise with wry humor, making the story all the stronger for it. The issue of gender has been refined as well—right out of the text, in fact. The non-issue of the narrator's sex quietly asks the unsettling question What does it matter? and then lets the story go on its lovely way. Notwithstanding her protests, Jeanette Winterson has once again proved to be a storyteller of compelling interest and exceptional grace.