The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson
Christopher Paddock

Jeanette Winterson. Gut Symmetries. Knopf, 1997. 223 pp. $22.00.

Winterson’s latest novel compares favorably with her previous work, particularly her brilliant Sexing the Cherry. Gut Symmetries is an alchemical blend of multiple narrators, fairy-tale allusions, and quantum physics theory. Winterson displays the same well-crafted, seraphic prose that has established her as one of Britain’s most intriguing and prodigious younger authors.
Gut Symmetries revolves around Alice, a young British physicist who has become the defining corner of a bizarre love triangle. She finds herself involved with a distinguished peer, Jove, whose pragmatic theories are the “future” of physics. His assured demeanor provides a point of reference for the uncertain Alice: “I could not define myself in relation to the shifting poles of certainty that seemed so reliable. What was the true nature of the world? What was the true nature of myself in it?” Jove’s wife Stella has grown intolerant of his affairs and arranges to confront Alice. Their meeting turns erotic and they become involved in a meaningful relationship of their own. Caught in the middle and yet on both sides of a marital feud, Alice struggles to find solid ground in a newly decentered reality.
Winterson’s use of structure and language is self-reflexive. Each chapter provides a shift between the perspective of characters, and perspectives shift with the dynamic nature of their three-way relationship. Seemingly uncontextualized sentences early in the novel reflect the physical and spirtual theories of an uncertain Alice. As the novel progresses, these sentences reappear and eventually become contextualized in symmetrical GUTs: the Grand Unified Theories needed to cope with a transmogrifying existence.
Gut Symmetries proves Winterson’s dynamic sense of language. It is a solid addition to an already stellar body of work. [Christopher Paddock]