FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
Gut Symmetries
by Jeanette Winterson
Alfred Knopf, 223 pp.Like the unforeseen products of gene experimentation or the strange fractal offspring of chaos theory and computer graphics, beautiful and disturbing growths spring from Jeannette Winterson's rare imagination. Gut Symmetries, in a style that recalls her earlier novel The Passion, combines the ethereal loveliness of the stars with the meaty miracles of the gut. For Winterson, human destiny is shaped by the planets in their courses, but also by the fleshy transactions of the food chain. Outer and inner space tumble together here, while Winterson's historical and scientific fascinations mingle with her taste for outlandish webs of plot and preposterous coincidence.
As in the Passion, the central plot device is a miraculous birth (it's not for nothing that Winterson was born into a Pentecostal Christian family). In Gut Symmetries, the heroine's expectant mother craves not pickles for her snacks, but diamonds. She gulps one down, "her aesophagus loaded with light." And what are diamonds but glittering stars rescued from the guts of the earth? This particular swallowed star changes the life of Winterson's newborn heroine. Lovers hunger after the special light within her; she becomes food for the lusts and fantasies of others.
Veteran Winterson readers will not be surprised to watch these metaphors turn literal as the novel proceeds. Where The Passion moved on a Paris-Venice-Moscow axis, Gut Symmetries shuttles between 1920s New York and London. Plenty of scope for romance there, in the Rabelaisian way-over-the-top way that Winterson does romance. Like Rabelais, she pushes the boundaries of taste - after all, they are boundaries, and she doesn't like those. The usual welter of striking images and heartfelt insights helps balance the grotesque elements. In fact the grotesque is Winterson's favorite spice.
Unfortunately, the early chapters almost choke on exposition of the fas- cinating science of the 1920s and after. It's relevant: a key character is a physicist. And scientific theories of the unity of everything - Grand Unified Theories, or G.U.T.s, get it? - can't help but tempt a metaphor-spinner like Winterson. Poets have always said everything is in some sense everything else, but after Einstein the scientists started suggesting it's literally true. Winterson is dying to share this with us, but offers too much information before the head-spinning inventiveness of her plots and language have us hooked. If you're a Winterson fan, you'll weather the early heavy-going. If you're merely Jeanette-curious, maybe try The Passion first to get warmed up.
Harry Vandervlist
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