Winterson (was Re: Post-Chicks)

[Mark A. Douglas]

> Derek:
> >I would add Jeanette Winterson, but I can't really recommend anything that
> >I would consider particularly good. She writes well, but her enourmous ego
> >("I basically AM Virginia Woolf except better") is impossible to extirpate
> >from the books and really gets in the way for me.
> >
>
>  I couldn't agree more.  I met her briefly after hearing her speak (on
> a promotion tour for _written on the body_) and was practically speechless
> with rage and admiration for her chutzpah. That she was surrounded by
> fauning lesbians can't have helped her modesty or my attitude, but I
> didn't like that book and my opinion of the previous ones suffered
> somewhat thereafter.  And she claimed never to have read Pynchon, nor
> to have the slightest inclination so to do.
>
> JL, the only fruit.
>
I remember Winterson's first book making a splash, and then not so much after
that.  Someone had mentioned Christa Wolff, and I thought "Cassandra" was
readable until the whole spycapade broke, and now I find that everything reads
sort of like an apology/defense.  Her life seems to have become her text for me.

I would recommend the two novels of Renata Adler.  "Speedboat" and "Pitch Dark"
are both excellent.  Mayhaps a little hard to find, but Adler is worth searching
out.

There is also Kathryn Kramer's "A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space" which
garnered some Pynchon comparisons on publication.  Blurbed by both Barth and
McElroy, it's a nice little take on family life.

Peace,
MAD
madness at airmail.net
...and I'm trying to get through Durrell's "Justine" and I keep waiting for a
plot, or for a story, or something...