Bloody, Beautiful Book

WORLD ELSEWHERE

By Jeanette Winterson

Alfred A. Knopf

240 pp., $22

Short stories are like lunch dates. They're brief little outings, so if you're hating every minute, don't worry--it will be over soon. But if you happen to enjoy the company at hand, you can linger together the whole afternoon.

The time I spent becoming acquainted with British author Jeanette Winterson in her new short story collection The World and Other Places was worthwhile. The conversation wasn't bad. She didn't bore. And every so often her genius came through and startled me.

Language and metaphor dominate Winterson's writing, which includes such well-received novels as Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Sexing the Cherry and Written on the Body. Her storytelling, however, gets lost in tales that at times seem written by a poet forced that to write fiction. Revealingly her most stunning piece is titled "The poetics of Sex." In it says of her lover: "How she fats me. She plumps me, pats me, squeezes and feeds me. Feed me up with lust till I'm as fat as she is." Such language, with its musicality and carefree rhymes reads like E.E. Cummings or Langston Hughes relineated to resemble prose. In this story, Winterson beautifully suggests that the "speech" of lovemaking enacts a "literature" that is at once confounding and universally understood.

She challenges the limits of such a canon by examining lesbian desire. Each section of the story begins with an ignorant question posed by a heterosexual, such as "Why Do You Sleep With Girls?" and "Which One of You Is the Man?" The narrator's complex and playfully oblique answers assert the legitimacy of her love though they never really tell us a story--veering instead towards commentary and description. I see the lack of substantial plot in Winterson's writing less as a flaw in her abilities as raconteur and more as her attempt to defy the genre of short fiction. She challenges our notions of love and storytelling simultaneously.

Winterson's less poetic efforts suffer from lapses into sentimental philosophizing, as if she momentarily invokes the Hallmark Muse. I'm all for stories that convey basic truths about humanity, but I'm against the author obtrusively pointing them out for me. I'm not even sure I know what a platitude like "The future is still intact, still unredeemed, but the past is irredeemable" from the story "Orion" means. Are our futures really that predetermined? And of course "the past is irredeemable"--It's already happened; it's gone. It's tautologies like that that make me lash out in my mind at Winterson and scream: "Just get on with your bloody beautiful tale!" These moments jolt readers back into their reality, into an annoying self-consciousness. Consider this silly offering from an otherwise tantalizing "Atlantic Crossing:" "God knows, we need what footholds we can find on the glass mountain of our existence." It's rather demeaning when authors--or anyone for that matter--thump their superior wisdom at the rest of us.

But Winterson has the talent to create such compelling, and at times mesmerizing, narrative worlds. In "Disappearance I," for example, she envisions a future in which the right to sleep has been legislated away. The narrator's occupation? A Dreamer, literally someone who dreams for everyone else. Yet seemingly mundane situation, such as befriending a pooch in "The 24-Hour Dog," are approached with equally fresh and keen perception. Winterson's quick scene changes, especially apparent in the latter story, can be jarring. But in another sense, it is as if she is a Cubist painter presenting varied perspectives in an attempt to avoid cliche and whisk you to the "other places" mentioned in the book's title.

So looking back on that lazy afternoon, I remember that she put me at ease and kept things interesting. There weren't too many of those awkward silences. You know, I think I'll ask out Jeanette Winterson again.