[In the following review, Miner offers a negative assessment of Written on the Body.]

Written on the Body is a short, dense novel fueled by intellectual ego and graced with wit. Jeanette Winterson's fourth book (following Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion and Sexing the Cherry) is an ambitious melding of meditation and high drama. Initially her characterization of the narrator promises a subversive portrayal of androgynous passion; ultimately, however, the romance is disappointingly conventional. Written on the Body is less a provocative vision of love than a hectic cerebration about obsession.

The first-person narrator, unidentified by name or gender, is a randy translator of Russian whose avocation is leaping from one London mattress to the next. Louise, a married woman, enters the scene and seduces the protagonist away from her/his current floozy, Jilly, a sweet but overly earnest zoologist. (Louise's marital status is relevant because the socially constructed, if materially invisible, narrator is aroused by bourgeois taboos against adultery.) Complications arise in the form of Louise's secret leukemia and villainous husband Elgin. To save Louise's life, our hero decides to disappear. The rationale for this disappearance is convoluted, not quite credible, and wholly consistent with the rules of standard melodrama.

While Written on the Body lacks subtle character shading and emotional authenticity, it does succeed—delightfully—as picaresque entertainment. Winterson's great strength here is her humor—fey, ironic, slapstick by turns. At one point, the narrator is so fixated on Louise that s/he handcuffs him/herself to a library seat.

I gave the key to the gentleman in the knitted waistcoat and asked him to let me free at five o'clock. I told him I had a deadline, that if I didn't finish my translation a Soviet writer might fail to find asylum in Great Britain. … my left hand was swelling up, I don't think it was getting enough blood being strapped to the chair leg. There was no sign of the gentleman. I signalled to a guard and whispered my problem. He returned with a fellow guard and together they picked up my chair and carried me sedan style down the British Library Reading Room. It is a tribute to the scholarly temperament that nobody looked up.

In the supervisor's office, I tried to explain.

“You a Communist?” he said.

“No I'm a floating voter.”

He had me cut loose and charged me for Wilful Damage To Reading Room Chair.

(pp. 94–95)

Winterson's language is keen, inventive, She nimbly juggles a number of popular stylistic techniques in this fragmented, chapterless, multi-tensed novel. Her verbally acrobatic narrator interrupts the story to muse on Louise's body, to converse directly with Louise, to address the reader. Her/his encyclopedic mind spins out thoughts on the structure of the human eye and observations about chronobiology.

Interest in the clock is growing because as we live more and more artificially, we'd like to con nature into altering her patterns for us. Night-workers and frequent fliers are absolutely the victims of their stubborn circadian clocks. Hormones are deep in the picture, so are social factors and environmental ones. Emerging from this melée, bit by bit, is light. The amount of light to which we are exposed crucially affects our clock. Light, Sun like a disc-saw through the body …

(p. 80)

Gradually, though, the protagonist grows drunk on overripe confidence and a little sloppy. The clever cleverness is self-defeating as s/he caricatures people who are fat, Jewish, anarchist, Australian. Against the backdrop of this cartoon gallery, the adulatory portrait of Louise becomes more suspect. Sometimes the humor is just corny. “You will think I have been constantly in and out of married women's lumber-rooms. I have had a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many.”

The plot of the cutting-edge soap opera wears thin, thinner. Androgyne meets girl. Androgyne dumps girl. Androgyne meets more girls and dumps them. Androgyne falls in love (whatever that means) with luscious lover. Lover gets sick. Androgyne behaves heroically. Will the two reunite? Will the lover die?

Pardon me, but who cares?

The narrator is such a shallow, sophomoric egoist that it's hard to keep reading. At first the concealment of his/her sex forecasts interesting theoretical questions about essentialism, but Winterson doesn't carry these identity questions beyond the gimmick. Gender is just one unknown about this strangely disembodied, decontextualized character. And who is Louise? Why should you care about her? What has she done or said to engage? All you know is that she is beautiful and frail, the cancer bestowing an automatic, if cheap, dignity. Louise and her lover are less psychologically and morally complex characters than stick figures with active mucous membranes.

The book itself is a device—beyond the s/he puzzle, the formulaic plot, the contrived people, even the pretty, abstruse meditations on anatomy—serving as a burlesque stage for a virtuoso vaudevillian. Clearly Jeanette Winterson is a writer of considerable artistic talent. And she has a canny, commercial eye for hot topics. However, she might learn a little about self-mockery from Fay Weldon, about intricate intellectual plotting from Iris Murdoch, about satiric timing from Michael Frayn. Here the narrator's self-conscious intellectualizing makes you feel as if you just had breakfast, lunch and dinner with André.

The momentum is there: words spit, dance. But ideas stall and language backs up as relentless conceit reduces the narrator to a tattoo artist. Written on the Body is not so much about sex or understanding or communion as about annexation.