Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

I miss God.  I miss the company of someone utterly loyal.  I still don't think of God as my betrayer.  The servants of God, yes, but servants by their nature betray.  I miss God who was my friend.  I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it.  I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky.

I read Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry for class a few years back, and really loathed it.  It probably remains, to this day, the least enjoyable book I have read since the Fifty Books Project began.  I'm not going to link to it because it's a pretty thoughtless review, and I don't do a very good job of laying out what I disliked about it.  But, if I recall correctly, I was bothered by the way the skeleton narrative was padded out with digressive passages of parable and fantasy that failed to illuminate anything about the main plot, thin though it was.  Sexing the Cherry struck me as a book of vignettes hastily cobbled together in the hopes that their multiplicity would mask their rather shallow observations about gender and sexuality.

You can imagine what I was thinking when I found out that Winterson's debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, had been made a mandatory text for one of the classes I'm teaching next year.  I picked it up with trepidation, to be sure--but, I am happy to say, I found Oranges to be a much better experience.  Perhaps some of that is because of ways I have changed in the past seven years.  But only some.

Unlike Sexing the Cherry, which has the intimacy and depth of a collection of fairy tales, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit presents itself as semi-autobiographical, detailing Winterson's childhood in an extremely evangelical family and the conflict created by her attraction to women.  Winterson's mother is kooky, an obsessive who throws herself into evangelizing with abandon, but Winterson's own belief is presented as very real and very treasured.  The scene in which Jeanette and her young lover, Melanie, are exposed in front of the church, is tragic and real:

'I will read you the words of St Paul,' announced the pastor, and he did, and many more words besides about unnatural passions and the mark of the demon.

'To the pure all things are pure,' I yelled at him.  'It's you not us.'

He turned to Melanie.

'Do you promise to give up this sin and beg the Lord to forgive you?'

'Yes.'  She was trembling uncontrollably.  I hardly heard what she said.

'Then go into the vestry with Mrs White and the elders will come and pray for you.  It's not too late for those who truly repent.'

He turned to me.

'I love her.'

'Then you do not love the Lord.'

'Yes, I love both of them.'

'You cannot.'

It's not always so heavy; in fact, Winterson treats her story with just the right amount of irony and humor (which, if I recall correctly, were noticeably absent from Sexing the Cherry.)  There's a scene--Lord knows how much truth is in it--where Jeanette, exiled from her family because of her sexuality, has taken a job driving an ice cream truck.  Through an odd turn of events, she's forced to help cater a funeral for an older woman who she had been very close to, and where she must encounter her mother and her mother's friends.  Afterward, the guests line up for ice cream before she can get away, and her mother's crew huffs over Jeanette "making money off the dead"--which is a great image of the way the judgment of others has of twisting one's identity.  But it's the absurdity of the scene that sells it, that somehow works to balance the awful sadness of it.

Winterson devotes a large section of the last chapters to a fable about a princess named Winnet.  This story reaffirmed my feelings about Sexing the Cherry, which was basically a collection of similar fables.  I would not claim that the story of Winnet has nothing to say about Jeanette's experience--surely, there are many parallels that Winterson wants us to see.  But the whole thing is so unnecessary, a needless diversion in a novel that would work much better without it.

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

"What are the characteristics of living things? At school, i biology I was told the following: Excretion, growth, irritability, locomotion, nutrition, reproduction, and respiration. This does not seem like a very lively list to me. If that's all there is to being a living thing I may as well be dead. What of that other characteristic prevalent in human living things, the longing to be loved? No, it doesn't come under the heading Reproduction. I have no desire to reproduce but I still seek out love. Reproduction. Over-polished Queen Anne style dining-room suite reduced to clear. Genuine wood. Is that what I want? The model family, two plus two in an easy home assembly kit. I don't want a model, I want the full-scale original. I don't want to reproduce, I want to make something entirely new. Fighting words but the fight's gone out of me."

Written on the Body is unlike anything that I've ever read. The narrator is not given an age, a gender, a name... What we know of the narrator is simply how their life has been defined, shaped, and changed by their romantic relationships over time. These relationships have been with both men and women, but the relationship that the book focuses on is the narrator's relationship with Louise, a fiery art historian married to an oppressive doctor named Elgin who controls Louise while going off on his own adventures to cavort with prostitutes.

The narrator acknowledges what s/he is doing to Louise's marriage and has no patience for adultery, however, points out that it's not s/he that's doing the cheating and is therefore somehow free of the ethical burden that goes along with this. The narrator for selfish reasons elevates their relationship over the marital relationship of Louise and Elgin, saying:
"When I say 'I will be true to you' I must mean it in spite of formalities, instead of the formalities If I commit adultery in my heart then I have lost you a little. The bright vision of your face will blur. I may not notice this once or twice, I may pride myself on having enjoyed those fleshy excursions in the most cerebral way. Yet I will have blunted that sharp flint that sparks between us, our desire for one another above all else." The narrator wants Louise, and the reader, to believe that regardless of how their relationship came to be it will not end with transgression.

The narrator vows to be true to Louise and goes to great measures to prove their love in the most irrational ways, wrecking friendships, handcuffing his/her arm to a chair at the library, being fired from work... Louise becomes the be all and end all of our narrator's life, the one consuming interest in passion in a way that is pathetic and pitiful. Why is it that people seem to not love enough or love so much that it's not love at all anymore, but obsession?

The twist in their love affair is that Louise has cancer and only Elgin, who has done advanced research on her particular brand of Leukemia, can save her. Our three main characters squabble over how to handle their precarious situation and in the end, it seems to me that all of them lose. I'll spare you the ending in case you care to read it.

While the plot is not wound together very tightly and I had some issues with the structure of the second half of the book, I have to say that overall I enjoyed reading Written on the Body. Christopher pointed out in his review of Sexing the Cherry that Winterson writes about ideas more than anything else and beats them to death. I found this to be true but could overlook it because I found her writing style to be lyrical and poignant. While I did not agree with everything that the narrator had to say, I found him/her to be painfully self-aware and insightful.

I don't know what to say about the narrator being genderless. Given that Winterson is usually pigeonholed as a LGBT writer (primarily due to her novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit), it was easy for me to fall into thinking that the novel was about a lesbian couple. Throughout the book, though, more passages than not made the voice seem to belong to a man. Do men and women love differently? Would I have reacted to the novel in another way if I had a physical description of the narrator?

This is as much a text about the human body as it is a text about two people trying to find their place. What happens to the body when it becomes a desired object, what happens when the T cells become problematic, what happens when something full of life gradually transitions into a state of decay?

"Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book."

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

I am quite thankful to be done with this maddening, suffocating, revolting book. I only finished it because I had to read it for a class, and if I hadn't vowed to read fifty books I probably wouldn't have read the whole thing then, either. Here is the plot as best as it can be described: A massive and maniacal person known only as the Dog-Woman fishes a baby out of the Thames and names it Jordan. They live through the rule of Cromwell and Jordan imagines some really dumb crap and tries to pass it off as a narrative. At the end, there is a hastily tacked-on epilogue which tries to introduce a couple of new modern characters and convince us that they are the reincarnations of Jordan and the Dog-Woman, and that that is somehow interesting or innovative.

The whole thing is full of metaphors beat senselessly into the ground:

He called me Jess because that is the name of the hood which restrains the falcon.

Palpable anti-male bias:

5. Men deem themselves weighty and women light. Therefore it is simple to tie a stone round their necks and drown them should they become too troublesome.

6. Men are best left in groups by themselves where they will entirely wear themselves out in drunkenness and competition. While this is taking place a woman may carry on with her own life unhindered.

And a whole bunch of forced images and vignettes that have no connection to any plotline whatsoever, and are only justified through the use of tired and half-baked metaphysical garbage:

OBJECTS 1: A woman looks into her bag and recognizes none of her belongings. She hurries home. But where is home? She follows the address written in her purse. She has never seen this house before and who are those ugly children wrecking the garden? Inside a fat man is waiting for his supper. She shoots him. At the trial she says she had never seen him before. He was her husband.

Winterson is insulting me by placing that last line there; I knew it was her husband. Read the whole thing again but leave off the last line--isn't that much better? Writers like Winterson spend so much time being clever that they come off as if they think they are much more clever than you. And then there's the recycled time is not linear ideas, the liberal self-righteousness, the flat characters, the Faulkner-lite trading off of point of view. This book prides itself on being about ideas, but if these ideas didn't get worn out in the twentieth century, surely Winterson has killed them.

Do not read this book.