Can you write a compelling love story if you conceal the gender of one of the lovers? That's what the much-acclaimed British Winterson attempts in her fourth novel (The Passion, 1988; Sexing the Cherry, 1990; etc.). All we know about the narrator: (S)he lives alone in a London flat. (S)he is a freelance translator (Russian into English). (S)he used to like guys, but now is into women. (S)he will fight if provoked (``I've always had a wild streak''). (S)he has been around the block, and the bedrooms of various married ladies; nonetheless, after Catherine, Inge, Bathsheba, etc., (s)he is settling down with nice, undemanding Jacqueline when along comes Louise: an Australian redhead, married for ten years to wealthy, Jewish Elgin, a cancer researcher. Louise pursues the narrator (``you were the most beautiful creature male or female I had ever seen''), who happily succumbs; Louise leaves Elgin, and the lovers have five blissful months together before Elgin tells the narrator that Louise has cancer. Back under his care, she might survive; otherwise, no hope. The narrator leaves town (``our love was not meant to cost you your life''), then returns but fails to find Louise, who miraculously reappears. Granted, Winterson has found a medium-hip narrative voice that fits her requirements; that aside, her concealed gender gimmick is a barren demonstration of her craft. The cost of withholding is too high; a strained lyricism must do duty for the particulars of love, and the puzzle distracts attention from the heart of the matter: Can a veteran of bedroom sports still find an enduring love? That question disappears down the Segalesque escape-hatch of the deadly disease.
Pub Date: Feb. 12, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42007-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
None
"If you can't deal with the morning, get out of the game." Maria Wyeth can't deal with the mornings or the long, disintegrating nights—she's been married to and divorced by Carter; she has a hopelessly damaged four-year-old and the insistent, regretful memory of an abortion; she's made a film or two; and she drifts from Hollywood to New York to Las Vegas and from bars to motels.In fact she's the kind of girl whom one of her looser contacts will call up and say "Did I catch you in the middle of an overdose" and this is the kind of scene which is "beaucoup fantastic." You may remember Run River (1963) which was about another scuffed spirit like Maria whose dissolution was as complete. But even though you have every reason to suspect that this is an ephemeral form of survival kitsch under its sophisticated maquillage, you won't be impervious.
None NonePub Date: July 13, 1970
ISBN: 0374529949
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1970
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
Deep and deeply funny.
A surreal love story about the courtship between a living woman and a dead man.
Rachel is a dark-haired, red-lipped reference librarian living in Brooklyn for whom romance, so far, has been a general disappointment. “I have fallen in love with my own daydreams,” she explains, “and then they have gone out into the world and returned to me embodied as men.” But the men disappoint, in the end. “It was not that the men themselves were realer than the daydream,” she says, but rather that the men were too weak to “withstand the daydream’s reality.” And then, at the bus stop, she sees Thomas and becomes fascinated by this electric, sad-seeming man. He notices her, too, drawn to her perpetual air of alert discomfort, “like a squirrel, or some other kind of nervous prey,” and one Saturday, she follows him onto his bus instead of her own and their courtship begins. (“Men like to believe that they initiate things, but often they only initiate when the fruit is very low-hanging,” she observes, in one of the book’s many delightfully blunt and correct observations.) The problem, of course, is that Thomas is dead. But because of an “institutional error”—the institution being death—he is “insufficiently dead” and so must be temporarily “re-manifested,” returned to a body that “exactly resembles” his own until “the Office” is able to “complete the procedures necessary to process” his arrival. They have issued a set of instructions designed to help him navigate this new phase of his not-quite-existence, all designed to prevent him from incurring regrets. “Sexual contact” is not advised in this state; it is “the most efficient way to incur regrets.” And also, his body is beginning to dissolve. It is a plot that could be—that should be—unbearably twee, oppressively quirky, in love with its own melancholy. Instead, Bonnaffons’ (The Wrong Heaven, 2018) first full-length novel is a rare pleasure: a philosophical rom-com too weird, too bodily, too precise, too fun to get bogged down in trembling sentiment.
Deep and deeply funny.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-51616-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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