Adam Mars-Jones GUT SYMMETRIES by Jeanette Winterson (Granta)
This novel (now in paperback) from a commendably retiring writer – it is known that she doesn’t read reviews of her work – repeats a number of themes from previous books:the deathliness of habit and the everyday, sexual triangles, a city viewed as phantasmagorical, the serviceability of a religious upbringing, retained in maturity as a set of symbols and ideas.
Readerly problems are recapitulated as well as writerly themes. Gut Symmetries has its share of Winterson’s tendency towards rhapsodic sermons or sermonising rhapsodies. What is characteristic of her work is not so much a style as a manner, a reflex reaching for infinities whether the subject is the pain of sexual betrayal (“I understand that pain leapfrogs over language and lands in dumb growls beyond time”) or the beauty of autumn in Vermont (“The sceptical world knee-deep in yods of falling fire”).
The characters in the novel’s triangle are Jove and his wife Stella, and Alice, lover first of one and then also of the other. Alice is an academic who lectures on “Paracelsus and the new physics”. Novels in the Eighties regularly featured glamorous or philosophically suggestive ideas from science in diluted form, and it’s hard to see that Winterson is doing anything different. It’s certainly true that Jove, Stella and Alice are at least as much like principles of physics as they are like vivid characters.
Another vogue of the Eighties, magic realism, leaves its mark on the novel. Miracles in real life are elevating, but in novels they tend to lower the spirits. Stella’s mother, pregnant with her, has a craving to eat diamonds, and one is mystically absorbed by the foetus, so that Stella is born with a diamond embedded in her spine. With each ramification of marvellousness the reader is likely to feel a little more resistant.
Gut Symmetries promises a drama and a resolution, but by the end of the book the storytelling element has all but evaporated and it would be indulgent to describe the plotting as ramshackle.
By this stage Winterson seems hypnotised by her own performance, radioactive with self-belief, as Quentin Crisp described Joan Crawford.