Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore.
When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. The cost of withholding is too high a strained lyricism must do duty for the particulars of love, and the puzzle distracts attention from the heart of the matter: Can a veteran of bedroom sports still find an enduring love? That question disappears down the Segalesque escape-hatch of the deadly disease.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Granted, Winterson has found a medium-hip narrative voice that fits her requirements that aside, her concealed gender gimmick is a barren demonstration of her craft. The narrator leaves town (``our love was not meant to cost you your life''), then returns but fails to find Louise, who miraculously reappears. Back under his care, she might survive otherwise, no hope. Louise pursues the narrator (``you were the most beautiful creature male or female I had ever seen''), who happily succumbs Louise leaves Elgin, and the lovers have five blissful months together before Elgin tells the narrator that Louise has cancer.
(S)he has been around the block, and the bedrooms of various married ladies nonetheless, after Catherine, Inge, Bathsheba, etc., (s)he is settling down with nice, undemanding Jacqueline when along comes Louise: an Australian redhead, married for ten years to wealthy, Jewish Elgin, a cancer researcher. (S)he will fight if provoked (``I've always had a wild streak''). (S)he used to like guys, but now is into women. (S)he is a freelance translator (Russian into English). All we know about the narrator: (S)he lives alone in a London flat. Can you write a compelling love story if you conceal the gender of one of the lovers? That's what the much-acclaimed British Winterson attempts in her fourth novel (The Passion, 1988 Sexing the Cherry, 1990 etc.).
0 kommentar(er)
