Adventures in Lesbian Fiction:

Written on the Body

by Jeanette Winterson

Review byThe Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com

Disclaimer: Some of these reviews will contain spoilers. All were generated after discussing the books in a lesbian book group to which I belong. However, the opinions represented below are my own, and nobody else connected with the group should be held responsible for them.

Nobody would ever argue that Jeanette Winterson is not a good writer; she certainly knows how to do things with words and her books are always compelling, one way or the other. Liza and I both like Sexing the Cherry a lot and I enjoyed Passion even though it didn't really grab me the same way; Liza has read The Powerbook and didn't think it was as good as the others. Written on the Body was a big deal when it first came out because of something that for us really wasn't that big a deal: the book is narrated by a character who is never given either a name or a gender. Since it's a love story, and the primary love object is a woman, but the narrator has had previous relationships with both men and women, the fact that you don't know whether the narrator is male or female is supposed to mess with your head. I could see how if you were a straight reader who had never read a lesbian love story before and didn't believe in bisexuality, it kind of would. However, I just decided early on that the narrator was female and that worked out pretty well for me. There's no way to 'prove' that she's a woman, but she certainly didn't come across as a man to me. Liza was less convinced, but acknowledged that the narrator was either "a man, or a butch lesbian." All the points she raised about the narrator's potential masculinity would also apply to a woman who was butch enough, so that's impossible to prove too. The main purpose of this technique--it would be unkind to call it a gimmick because she does handle it pretty unobtrusively and it's really the reviewers that turned it into one--is to force the narrator to describe love and sex without resorting to the familiar cliches, and once again, we have to take our hats off to her on that front. Her descriptions are often very beautiful and she certainly conveys the intimacy and the power and depth of feeling between the narrator and her lover. We also really liked the digressions about the narrator's previous love interests, many of which are intentionally absurd and hilarious. So for about the first half of the novel, we were really enjoying it, even though the fact that the narrator has spent a lifetime seducing and being seduced by married women made for some annoying disquisitions about the relationship between passion and long-term commitment. We believe, based on our own experience, that it just keeps getting better; Winterson, based on this book and on her others, seems to be convinced that once you settle down, it's all over.

To the extent that it has a plot, Written on the Body is about a person who has had a string of abortive, short, often clandestine relationships (s/he says s/he is "addicted to the first six months") who has finally found what s/he believes, at the moment anyway, is The Big One. The Big One is a red-haired beauty named Louise who is married to a truly heinous and hyper-annoying oncologist named Elgin (yes, after the Elgin Marbles, there's a long story about that). The narrator is involved in a one-year relationship with an assistant zookeeper named Jacqueline who specializes in counseling traumatized small furry animals. However, it's clear that the narrator never really cared much about Jacqueline, so watching him/her go through the whole "adultery angst" thing makes you really kind of want to smack him/her for jerking this poor woman around for a year only to dump her as soon as something better comes along. Unlike all the other married women, this one is ready and willing to leave her husband, and for the first half of the book you're thinking the big crisis will be: can the narrator's love survive the long-term availability of the beloved, or will this one end after the first six months too?

Unfortunately, halfway through the book something Dramatic happens. Now, it is supposed to be a shock, so to tell you what it is would be a major spoiler; so unfortunately that's going to make it hard to explain why we both hated the second half of this book with a passion. All I can tell you is that after getting Bad News of possibly the most melodramatic kind, and after one of the book's villains pulls a scam on him/her that a child could see through, the narrator does something that the narrator believes is A Noble And Selfless Renunciation, but that anyone with two brain cells can immediately see is either the most moronic mistake ever made in the history of star-crossed loving, or a gigantic, horrific, and utterly craven and scurrilous betrayal of Louise. For the rest of the novel, you have to watch the narrator wallow in grief and pain which s/he believes s/he is enduring for the sake of the beloved, but which you as the reader with two brain cells know is completely unnecessary and unjustified. This leads to an interesting section in which the narrator becomes obsessed with human anatomy textbooks and uses them to write intense, lyrical descants on Louise's body which are by turns beautiful, moving, and disturbing as hell; but because from our point of view the narrator had already forfeited her right to call what s/he was feeling for Louise love, this section was also highly annoying. Meanwhile, there is some unnecessary low comedy involving the overweight, randy, sexually agressive female boss at the narrator's new job, and when the narrator finally comes to understand--thanks to this same overweight, randy, sexually aggressive, and, at the time, drunk off her ass and puking boss--that s/he has Made A Terrible Mistake, that's supposed to be a revelation. In fact it just makes you want to smack the narrator for having taken this long to figure that out. A Noble Quest undertaken after this revelation leads to a most unconvincing ending.

So unfortunately, what you have in Written on the Body is a very good book shackled indissolubly to a very bad book. By the time you've waded through the bad half, you've sort of soured on the good half. It's too bad, because the good stuff is really good; but there you are. I would recommend giving it a try, especially if your tolerance for unnecessary self-inflicted masochistic lover angst is higher than mine is; but be forewarned. Winterson is a wonderful writer, but as a storyteller, in this book anyway, she leaves a lot to be desired.

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