Written on the Body

I’ve been meaning to read Written on the Body for ages.  Jeanette Winterson’s one of those authors where I don’t even need to know what her books are about to want to read them.  This is actually pretty beneficial as a lot of her books don’t seem to be about anything much.  They, in my experience, consist largely of semi-philosophic, poetic musings on love and sex.  Written on the Body definitely fits in with Winterson’s oeuvre in this sense.

The plot, such as it is, follows an unnamed narrator through a string of girlfriends and recollections about past boyfriends until they meet Louise.  The narrator loves Louise.  Actually loves her; not in the way that Louise (correctly) identifies as a line trotted out as part of a well-worn path of seduction.  Louise knows the narrator better than that; she refuses to be loved as others before her have been loved.  Anyway, Louise is married.  Naturally things go about as well as you’d expect relationship-wise with Louise, especially after attempts to leave her ridiculously named, scheming doctor husband, Elgin.  I have issues with not thinking of marbles when I hear the word “Elgin.”  That aside, there’s also an unlikely cancer-based plot twist and the lovers are parted.  The rest of the book is the sex-musings and poorly thought out life choices born of missing Louise.

One of the things that I actually really liked about this book was Winterson’s choice to not give the narrator a gender.  Next to nothing is actually revealed about the narrator, they are a character written about through the people they love rather than in and of themselves.  They are defined through their partners.  It’s so refreshing.  There are very few books that treat gender and sexuality as irrelevant; even more than twenty years after it was written.  And it’s clearly not that Written on the Body doesn’t deal with ideas of sexuality, rather it treats any prefix to the word “sexuality” as irrelevant.  As do all the characters.  It’s the sort of thing you want to see in a book, it’s a shame that a book written in the 90s is more on it in terms of LGBT themes than actual society is now.

So, I liked this book.  There’s always something almost whimsical about the way Winterson writes.  As I mentioned earlier, it’s poetic and meanders along to no sort of conclusion.  Louise disappears.  There is no happy resolution, or a truly tragic one.  Although her disappearance is a gaping hole in the narrative, in the narrator’s life, things continue.  Life continues.  And that, the fact that it ends when it does makes it so hard to get a grasp on the book.  It just ends. 

My next read is Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis.