The PowerBook by Jeanette
Winterson
After Repeated Readings...
While many other novels are still nursing hangovers from the 20th
century, The PowerBook has risen early to greet the challenge of the new
millennium. Set in cyberspace, Jeanette Wintersons seventh novel (or
eighth, if you count her disowned Boating for Beginners) travels with
ease, casting the net of its love story over Paris, Capri, and London. Its
interactive narrator, Ali, is a language costumier who will swathe your
imagination in the clothes of transformation: all you have to do is decide
whom you want to be. Ali--known also as Alix--is a virtual narrator in a
networked world of e-writing. You are the reader, invited to inhabit the
story--any story--you wish to be told. As in all the best video games, you
can choose your location, your character, even the clothes you want to
wear. Beware: you can enter and play, but you cannot determine the
outcome. Ali/x is a digital Orlando for the modern age, moving across
time and through transmutations of identity, weaving her stories with long
lines of laptop DNA and shaping herself to the readers desire. She wants
to make love as simple as a song, but even in cyberspace there is no
love without pain. Ali/x offers a stranger on the other side of the screen
the opportunity of freedom for one night. She falls in love with her
beautiful stranger, and finds herself reinvented by her own story. The
PowerBook is rich with historical allegory and literary allusion. Wintersons
dialogue crackles with humor, snappy dialogue, and good jokes, several
of which are at her own expense. This is a world of disguise, boundary
crossing, and emotional diversions that change the navigation of the plo t of
life. Strangely sprouting tulips are erected in place of the phallus.
Husbands and wives are uncoupled. Lovers disappear in the night to
escape from themselves. On the hard drive of The PowerBook are stored
a variety of stories that the reader can download and open at will,
complete stories that loop through the central narrative. The tale of
Mallorys third expedition, the disinterring of the Roman Governor of
London in Spitalfields Church, or the contemplation of great and ruinous
lovers are capsules of narrative compression. In Wintersons compacted
meaning, language becomes a character in its own right--it is one of the
heroes of the novel. What I am seeking to do in my work is to make a
form that answers to 21st-century needs, Winterson has written. The
PowerBook does just that. Her prose has found a metaphor for its
linguistic forms of creation that feels almost invented for her, a web of
coordinates that will change the world. There will be a virtual rush of
Internet-themed books in the networked naughties. With The PowerBook
Winterson has triumphantly gotten there first. --Rachel Holmes
Personal Review: The PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson
Winterson's "The PowerBook" gets better and better. Potentially one of
her more esoteric and theoretical works, "PowerBook" details the virtual
experiences of Ali/x and her reader (you). I'll confess that I found it a bit
overwhelming at first read, but nonetheless haunting enough to give it a
second go. With each repeated reading, I've come to love "The
PowerBook" more and more.
Winterson's classic style, with her musings on love, life, time and desire, is
in top form here. The updating and modernizing of the medium allows for
new insights into the "same old topics," as well as the chance to literally re-
write the plots of the characters as needed.
Though not as easily accessible as "Written on the Body" or even
"Oranges Aren't the Only Fruit," I think that "The PowerBook" does
ultimately surpass both in its revelations and superb writing. If you've read
it once and merely liked it, read it again to love it. If you're considering
reading it, jump in; be prepared to savor it again if needed. It'll be a
pleasure every time.
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