Beware of shallowness
James Wood
- Art & Lies by Jeanette Winterson
Cape, 224 pp, £14.99, June 1994, ISBN 0 224 03145 7
Each new book by Jeanette Winterson is said to be poorer than its predecessor; she is like a bibliographer’s definition of nostalgia. As her novels become more ghostly, so they give off a stronger vapour of self-promotion. Her last, Written On The Body, announced on its cover that it had ‘fused mathematical exactness and poetic intensity and made language new’. Her latest also bears a Winterson-accented description on its jacket: ‘Art & Lies is a rich book, bawdy and beautiful, shocking because of its beauty ... a dangerous book, banked with ideas forced out of the words themselves, not words for things, but words that are living things with the power to move.’
The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.
You are not logged in
- If you have already registered please login here
- If you are using the site for the first time please register here
- If you would like access to the entire online archive subscribe here
- Institutions or university library users please login here
- Learn more about our institutional subscriptions here
Vol. 16 No. 13 · 7 July 1994 » James Wood » Beware of shallowness
page 9 | 1962 words