[In the following review, Alter faults the stereotypical characterizations and the accuracy of the scientific information in Gut Symmetries.]

[Gut Symmetries] is the sixth novel by Jeanette Winterson, a young British writer who has frequently been celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic as the bright new light of English fiction. She has happily embraced this judgment: on at least two occasions, when asked to choose the best work of fiction to have appeared in England during the previous year, she confessed that she could think of nothing that equaled the richness of her own most recent book.

But one should not hold a writer's self-promotion against her. (In the words of Hillel the Elder, “If I am not for myself, who is for me?”) Jeanette Winterson is a writer who has a genuine passion about the revelatory experience of art—as attested by her recent volume of essays, Art Objects—a genuine passion about language and a serious reflectiveness about the complex moral circuitries of carnal passion. Occasionally, all of this coalesces in a moment of illumination, as when Alice, one of the three protagonist narrators of Gut Symmetries, comments on the narcissistic gratification of becoming the lover of her male lover's wife: “Desiring her I felt my own desirability. It was an act of power but not power over her. I was my own conquest.” There are also fleeting passages that are poetically evocative, like this glimpse of New York in the penultimate paragraph of the novel: “The city is a scintilla, light to light, quartz and neon of the Brooklyn Bridge and the incandescence of the stars.” An energy of satiric observation enlivens her writing and can generate shrewd comedy—when, that is, it is undistorted by tendentiousness, as in her relentless war against what I suppose we must now call heterosexual marriage.

Winterson's hostility to marriage is a symptom of her recurrent inclination to skew reality in the interest of some preconceived ideas. In Winterson's novels, married women, in contradistinction to women in same-sex couples, consistently find themselves trapped in a living hell, and it always seems to be the fault of the man, who is variously callous, cruel, careeristic, indifferent and sexually unfaithful. The husband in Gut Symmetries literally eats his wife alive, which makes him the perfect realization of a metaphor implicit in her earlier fiction. Of course, there are such one-sided marital disasters; but reason suggests that lesbian couples, given the intractable stuff of human nature, have their own pathologies. In any case, observation (not to speak of introspection) would indicate that most soured relationships are the fault in varying degree of both parties. If there is a principal culprit, it could as easily be the woman as the man. What is proffered as a vision of the human world, in Winterson's novels, is sometimes no more than a special pleading about it.

There are, as I have intimated, local virtues in Winterson's writing, but the problem is that they never quite cohere into a compelling artistic whole. Gut Symmetries, which is not one of her most successful books, offers an instructive object-lesson as to why this should be so. Let me say first that, despite the plot of triangular desire (which includes an episode of cannibalism and a brink-of-death experience), this is not really a novel about eroticism, illicit or otherwise, and it is by no means a sensationalistic book. Winterson's real concern is with desire as an element of something much bigger—a visionary perception of the human condition, of the small but precious purchase that our transient intensities of living have in the infinite expanses of the starry spaces. Thus the novel's last sentence: “Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.”

The earnest vagueness of that concluding statement is a symptom of the underlying deficiency of Winterson's work. She aspires to profundity, but the metaphysical concepts that she invokes are scarcely more than metaphorical conceits. Her language too often visibly strains to be rich and mysterious, and her characters suffer from a lack of specific gravity as realized individuals, which makes them unpersuasive as vehicles for her philosophic or visionary alms.

Both Alice and Jove, the man with whom she takes up at the beginning of the novel, are theoretical physicists, and there are repeated lucubrations on quantum mechanics, relativity, black holes, string theory and the like. The title itself is meant to be a resonant pun, referring at once to the symmetries of visceral experience among the three sexual partners and to an acronym current among physicists, Grand Unified Theories. But, at least as far as this layman can make out, the concepts of theoretical physics are treated as no more than loose and fanciful analogies for the preoccupations of a very literary person. Since, for example, in quantum experiments “particles can hold positions contradictory and simultaneous,” the narrator can grandly conclude that “in a quantum universe, heaven and hell are simply [sic] parallel possibilities.” In similar fashion, precise correspondences are proposed (Winterson is not the first to do so) between the highly paradoxical view of reality of the kabbalah and the paradoxes of modern physics.

I am not competent to judge the accuracy of the scientific ideas invoked, though a few obvious errors make me wonder about the rest. The Greeks did not seriously think the world was flat (the scientists of Alexandria worked out a measurement for the Earth's circumference accurate within a few hundred miles), and it is not true that Newton's theories “remained triumphant and unchallenged” until the publication of Einstein's two epochal papers in 1905 (decades earlier Riemann had conceived curved space and Maxwell's equations had anticipated electromagnetic waves). As to language, though Winterson can on occasion write very well, there is altogether too much flexing of stylistic muscle, often producing grotesque effects. Hyperbole predominates: “He crying in salt waterfalls, she scattering her tears like gunshot.” “I was gargoyled with grief. A stretched taunted thing. A water-spout of misery.” And this of a character who thinks she is about to die: “I seem to be tumbling over myself, ready to tunnel out of the womb of the world, my hands and feet bouncing off its warm wall.”

The excess of that last clause is the watermark of Winterson's overwrought style. She tries to impart to the characters a terrific intensity lacking in their inner lives through the sheer energy of metaphoric invention. Or, to state this in terms of her relation to her medium rather than her characters, she exerts a certain violence of figuration in order to affirm her originality. She does this in order to stay two steps ahead of the spectre of literary cliché, which in fact holds a hidden attraction for her, as in this shop-worn romantic image of despair: “Where was I in the night where two dogs howled at the moon and a ruined tower reflected down at me?” or in the threadbare lyricism of sentences such as “the world is still sleeping in its coverlet of stars.” To the extrusion of the poetic effect through hyperbole, one must add the little explosions of alliteration that punctuate the narrative, in which, as if in a Nabokovian language gone mad, the sheer repetition of an initial consonant is meant to signify vigor, imagination and wit: “Yes, look at her, bunioned, bulbous, hair in bulrush rolls, buttheaded, butter-hearted and tenacious as a buckaroo.”

The ultimate problem with these gestures of style and these conjurings of concepts is that the characters themselves have a cartoonish flatness—it is Winterson's most postmodern trait—that makes it hard to accept them as agencies in which the great issues of time and eternity and the poetic fire of Olympus are engaged. Concomitantly, literary allusion, which is the essential lexicon of the language of literature, dwindles here to the flat mention of antecedent works. Robinson Crusoe, Moby-Dick, Whitman and Homer are adduced, but with no resonance of imaginative relationship, intertextuality itself having lost its bite. The link of the characters with cultural, historical and geographical realities is as tenuous as their correspondence to literary analogues and as thin as the realization of their inner lives.

A case in point is the peculiar Jewishness of Stella, who is Jove's wife and becomes Alice's lover. Her mother is a German Christian, her father an Austrian Jew, antiquarian bookdealer and student of the kabbalah. The kabbalistic connection, on which Winterson has done some homework, is important to her for furthering the metaphysical concerns of the novel. But, in order to make Stella's father a kabbalist, the novelist must also represent him as an Orthodox Jew, donning prayer shawl and tefillin for his daily morning worship and consorting with ultra-Orthodox diamond merchants. The problem is that Winterson has not really bothered to find out anything about how Orthodox Jews behave. They don't marry German shiksas and continue to observe their orthodoxy punctiliously. They never pray, as the father here is said to do, at high Reform congregations such as “the Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue.” (And they would never use that incorrect definite article.) They never use “Abel” as a first name. And where a people, or a place, or an individual personage, is not imagined in the density of its particular existence, gaping holes are left, and through them the ever-lurking cliché comes flying into the world of the novel, as in this Jewish credo of Stella's:

I come from a people to whom the invisible world is everyday present. A people for whom there is no death though death has followed them across history and continents. I come from a people who hope against hope, whose melancholy is the outer garment of their mirth. In their celebrations and in their mournings, the spirit is the same.

The empty sentimentality and the facile mystification of these lines hardly require comment. What strikes me is how neatly they complement the hostile stereotypes in Winterson's fiction. (The Jewish physician-husband in Written on the Body is a compound of these stereotypes.) That is, if you denigrate whole classes of human beings and human relationships, there is likely to be a compensatory reflex, in which you raise certain classes of people or kinds of relationships up, and attribute to them an intrinsic and unique aura or spiritual power. (In her acknowledgments to Gut Symmetries, Winterson thanks her “Jewish friends who taught me their love and mystery.”) And it is not really so surprising that the same group may be alternately the subject of hostility and sentimentality.

Jeanette Winterson does not always writes such hackneyed stuff; but her worst writing is a symptom of why she is not better than she is. She has a flare for language, and there are moments of genuine feeling in her work. They are perhaps most strikingly evident in the story of a love wrenchingly lost at the end of Written on the Body, a novel that appeared in 1992. But she is too prone to reach for the shortcut to profundity and intensity. Too often she prefers rhetorical gesture and conceptual name-dropping to the arduous, deeply interesting business of imagining character, idea and circumstance.