Art & Lies

Art and Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd, American Ed. FROM THE PUBLISHER The novel brings together three apparently disparate figures on a single day in a single place - a high-speed train hurtling through the present or near-future (though the book itself ranges freely over the centuries). Handel is an ex-priest turned surgeon, a man whose humanity has been sacrificed to intellect. Picasso, a young woman cast out by the family that drove her to madness, is comforted only by her painting. And Sappho is the famed lesbian poet of antiquity, as alive as her immortal verse. Each is at once beguilingly symbolic and painfully real, alienated from a brutal technological world and united by Winterson's narrative, which directs them together towards a single end of satisfying inevitability. A story of lust, the unloved and loss, Art & Lies is also a jeremiad upholding the virtues of culture against the cold numbness of modern life. Erudite, impassioned, philosophical and, above all, daring, Winterson enfolds her characters in the ageless beauty of art - with a depth of feeling every bit as dazzling as her rich prose and fierce intellect. FROM THE CRITICS Publisher's Weekly Set on a train traveling through a dystopian future England, Winterson's latest novel is a patchwork meditation on identity and artistry. _______________________________________ To read Jeanette Winterson's 'Art & Lies' can and should be compared to the process of eating a glazed cream éclair. It is rich, it is melancholically sweet, it is pleasurable. Conjuring, her work strikes the reader with its clarity, its lucidity, its beauty. A delicious delirium. While the plot remains in the background, the nudity of confessional tone and stylistic voice lulls you to sleep only to slap you awake in the following paragraph. The price of each paragraph is a petal, as Emily Dickinson once wrote. A remarkable poetic novel, these words should keep you up nights and days in daze.

As the subtitle suggests, this novel hinges on a metaphor of four-part musical harmony. Like music, it does not need to be "about" anything. (If you need a complex and sophisticated plot to hold your interest, this book is not for you.) Each character has a story, no doubt, but what matters is what emotions their lives evoke. Winterson uses her considerable command of metaphor, history, symbolism, and all things bizarre to portray the emotional lives of three very different characters. This is as it should be, for detailed accounts of their lives would ruin the book. It would instead be just the sad and rather ordinary story of a madwoman, a lonely old doctor, and a sleepless poet. Instead, Winterson has used key events of her characters' lives as a framework on which to craft something rich and strange.

I have read with interest other readers' reviews of "Art & Lies," and must respond to one posted on January 24, '97, by "a reader." This reader was gave four stars, questioning Winterson's lack of a strong narrative structure. Anyone interested in Winterson's ideas of the importance of plot should refer to "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" and "Art [Objects]," her collection of essays. To over-simplify, her allegiance is given not to events but to the creative collaboration between author and reader, and therefore her focus is on evocative language. Narrative is, to her, only a jumping-off point for an imaginative process. A tension she exploits and expresses far better than I is that between the dry precision of a word's dictionary meaning and its power to evoke a multitude of images, emotions, analyses and other responses-- responses based both upon individuals' subjective points of view and their more general educational context. I believe it was Pope who said that poetry was "the right words in the right order." He didn't say anything about exposition, complication, or denouement. For those who would prefer the comfort of labels, then, she should perhaps be placed more on the side of the poet than the novelist as we understand the roles, for which placement she has actually stated a preference. I understand this reader's desire for more of a plot to help hold his attention when the admittedly heavy lyricism drowns him: but I must express my own view that the brief periods of standard narrative make up small oases that let us examine the lyricism with greater interest, due to the contrast. I would compare the structure to parts of Thomas Pynchon's "V," in which scenes of everyday, simple human emotion and/or tedium are contrasted with segments of such appalling nihilism, savagery, global corruption and moral decay that one wonders how he could stand to write them. In appreciating the one, a reader is [or can be] led to more thoroughly delve into the other. I might be tempted to relieve "Art & Lies" of one of its full five stars too, because of how hard I find it to get through a lot of Sappho's chapters, even having read it six or seven times. However, Handel's confession scene is so heart-rending that I choose to take on faith connections I may not get yet. Each time I reread the work something new strikes me, and my previous judgments blur together into one new form. I think Winterson's aim is to blur format and structure in favor of content, to unmoor us from the security of knowing what to expect from a book, to throw us mercilessly into something to which we must bend our utmost attention. She wants us engaged, active, on our toes. I'll figure out what to make of Sappho if I keep thinking about it, and so I must give this five stars; if only because I first read it two years ago and haven't finished thinking about it. Feel free to e-mail me, especially if you have Sappho insights!

I've read all of Jeanette's books, including her two screenplays, her book of essays, her comic book, and collection of short stories. Art & Lies remains my favourite of all time. Rich with layers, and exceedingly profound, this book changed my life. It's her most difficult one (which is why some people hate it), but the most rewarding. Read it several times and it will only get better.

Art & Lies is not an easy book to follow and offers no quick passages to breeze through on your way to work. It's thick with imagary and prose that must be taken at a proper pace or else you run the risk of missing half of its beauty. I've read it now three times -- each with just as much enjoyment -- and it ranks with Kundera's "Immortality" as my favorites of all time.