Physics seems to have become the new language of love in the 1990s, and Jeanette Winterson is not the first writer to make a major character a physicist. Jonathan Lethem mined similar territory earlier this year in his delightful book, As She Climbed Across the Table, and now Winterson enters the lists with not one, but two physicists populating the pages of her equally wonderful book, Gut Symmetries. If you think about it, physics does make a good metaphor for love, encompassing as it does the principles of attraction, the exchange of energy, and unification. At the center of this meditation on "the intelligence of the universe" and "the stupidity of humankind" are Jove, a married physicist; Alice, a single physicist who becomes his mistress; and Stella, Jove's wife and later, Alice's lover. They meet on the QE2 and from there the three participants in the story take turns telling their versions of it. Gut Symmetries is a collage of memories, snippets of scientific theory, meditations on abstract concepts like truth, and the events surrounding Jove, Alice, and Stella's affair. This is a book that demands your attention, jumping as it does from one seemingly tangential topic to another; but whereas physics still seeks a grand unification theory (GUT) to explain how everything in the universe fits together, Winterson actually finds one of her own in this satisfyingly complete fictional world.


From Library Journal
"Forgive me if I digress," says one character in this latest effort from the author of brilliant works like Written on the Body (LJ 2/15/93)?but you can't. The premise is so promising?the QE2 is sailing from Southampton to New York, and with the narrator lecturing on board about Paracelsus and the new physics, the reader naturally expects the sort of time-bending episodes and cool cultural assessment at which Winterson excels?that her failure to launch her own Ship of Fools is especially disappointing. A typically sharp-tongued and ambiguous Winterson character, the narrator conducts affairs with a husband and wife simultaneously (the husband, in fact, is a lecturer on time travel) but remains irksome and dull in the numerous platidinous observations that litter the page. Heavy-handed, humorless, and structurally fragmented, this is a grave disappointment from the talented Winterson. Buy only where her works are popular.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Bruce Bawer
Like its predecessors, this is a short book but not a quick read. At a time when many publishers expect literary novels to have the relentless forward motion of an Indiana Jones movie, Ms. Winterson refuses to shift into narrative drive; eschewing the Interstate, she favors the bumpy, meandering byways of interior landscapes. At every turn, furthermore, her fresh, vivid way of putting things stops one dead in admiration. "In 1959," Alice recalls, her successful father "was in the fullness of his present," having seen that the key to success was to "pan the living clay that you are and find gold in it." In Gut Symmetries, Ms. Winterson has struck gold herself.


From Booklist
Given the title, it's no surprise to discover that bizarre acts of eating are key plot elements in Winterson's new novel about a love triangle, but "gut" is also linked with "instinct" and "GUT" is an acronym for Grand Unified Theories, the gold physicists seek through the alchemy of their lovely speculations. And speaking of physicists, two of Winterson's embroiled lovers are such, and questions of matter, energy, and flux are mirrored in conflicts of love, desire, and guilt (that's where the symmetry comes in). The physicists--Alice, and Jove, who is married to a poet named Stella (stars, too, are important)--begin their affair on board the QE2, another significant clue since ships of fools figure prominently in this cosmic drama. Such details point to Winterson's cleverness, but they can't begin to convey the soulfulness of this masterfully written, highly suspenseful, and penetrating bisexual love story. Winterson, ever innovative and unnerving even as she is enchanting, dives to remarkable emotional depths as she moves toward the revelation that "total beauty" is what makes life worth living. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Always a narrative daredevil and linguistic voluptuary, Winterson (Art and Lies, 1995, etc.) sustains a level of writing here that's at once incantatory, discursive, and passionate: a breath-taking Joycean romp that explores the mysteries of love in a world freed from common sense by the wonders of modern math and physics. Winterson's story is, in part, about a love triangle. Two physicists meet on the QE2 en route to New York: He's an Italian- American from the Lower East Side whose mother made a fortune as an importer. Now a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, Giovanni Baptiste Rossetti (nicknamed ``Jove'') revels in his literary forerunners, from the mythic King of Gods to Mozart's seduced. His fantasies of primacy and potency express themselves in his affair with Alice (short for Alluvia) Fairfax, an English scientist on her way to the Institute--herself in the grip of a millennial fever, and willing to entertain the alchemical and religious dimensions of her work. But the neat symmetry of things is changed when Alice meets Stella, Jove's wife. Expecting a dumpy harridan, Alice discovers an elegant poet, with whom she begins an affair, much to Jove's dismay. The daughter of refugees from Nazi Germany, Stella balances her mother's practical nature with her Jewish father's visionary rantings. Indeed, the new physics comes to parallel the wisdom of the Jewish mystics, at least in Winterson's heady view. In a world of ``scraps,'' each lover seeks wholeness, whether in God or science. As improbable as the narrative connections become, they make perfect sense on the level that really matters here: Winterson's ``aerodynamics of risk.'' Winterson cleverly undercuts her highbrow riffing with puns, playlets, and poetry, reasserting in her art the most essential of points: ``Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.'' A major book, by any standard. (First printing of 40,000) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Brilliant ... [Gut Symmetries] scintillates with a language live enough to carry a wild musing on the largest issues of our existence." - The Globe and Mail

"Beyond comparison.... Few writers can contend with Jeanette Winterson.... She writes like a demon drunk with love, and if there's a sentence in Gut Symmetries that doesn't startle readers with its bravery and wit, then they're not reading hard enough." - The Chronicle-Journal

"Fascinating, provocative.... Jeanette Winterson proves she is as literarily nimble as she is intellectually stimulating." - The Montreal Gazette

"Riveting ... [Winterson] expresses the range of the human soul with startling ingenuity." - The Vancouver Sun


From the Hardcover edition.


Review
"Brilliant ... [Gut Symmetries] scintillates with a language live enough to carry a wild musing on the largest issues of our existence." - The Globe and Mail

"Beyond comparison.... Few writers can contend with Jeanette Winterson.... She writes like a demon drunk with love, and if there's a sentence in Gut Symmetries that doesn't startle readers with its bravery and wit, then they're not reading hard enough." - The Chronicle-Journal

"Fascinating, provocative.... Jeanette Winterson proves she is as literarily nimble as she is intellectually stimulating." - The Montreal Gazette

"Riveting ... [Winterson] expresses the range of the human soul with startling ingenuity." - The Vancouver Sun


From the Hardcover edition.


Book Description
The highwire artist of the English novel redraws the romantic triangle for the post-Einsteinian universe, where gender is as elastic as matter, and any accurate Grand Unified Theory (GUT) must encompass desire alongside electromagnetism and gravity.One starry night on a boat in the mid-Atlantic, Alice, a brilliant English theoretical physicist, begins an affair with Jove, her remorselessly seductive American counterpart. But Jove is married. When Alice confronts his wife, Stella, she swiftly falls in love with her, with consequences that are by turns horrifying, comic, and arousing. Vaulting from Liverpool to New York, from alchemy to string theory, and from the spirit to the flesh, Gut Symmetries is a thrillingly original novel by England's most flamboyantly gifted young writer."Winterson is unmatched among contemporary writers in her ability to conjure up new-world wonder...A beautiful, stirring and brilliant story."--Times Literary Supplement"Dazzling for [its] intelligence and inventiveness...[Winterson] is possessed of a masterly command of the language and a truly pliant imagination."--Elle"One of our most brilliant, visionary storytellers."--San Francisco Chronicle


From the Inside Flap
The highwire artist of the English novel redraws the romantic triangle for the post-Einsteinian universe, where gender is as elastic as matter, and any accurate Grand Unified Theory (GUT) must encompass desire alongside electromagnetism and gravity.

One starry night on a boat in the mid-Atlantic, Alice, a brilliant English theoretical physicist, begins an affair with Jove, her remorselessly seductive American counterpart. But Jove is married. When Alice confronts his wife, Stella, she swiftly falls in love with her, with consequences that are by turns horrifying, comic, and arousing. Vaulting from Liverpool to New York, from alchemy to string theory, and from the spirit to the flesh, Gut Symmetries is a thrillingly original novel by England's most flamboyantly gifted young writer.

"Winterson is unmatched among contemporary writers in her ability to conjure up new-world wonder...A beautiful, stirring and brilliant story."--Times Literary Supplement

"Dazzling for [its] intelligence and inventiveness...[Winterson] is possessed of a masterly command of the language and a truly pliant imagination."--Elle

"One of our most brilliant, visionary storytellers."--San Francisco Chronicle

ANNOTATION

Hailed in The Washington Post as 'one of our most important writers in English,' Jeanette Winterson has firmly established her reputation as an extraordinarily daring and original novelist. In Gut Symmetries, lives and universes run parallel in a complex contemporary love story set in New York and Liverpool, and aboard the QE2.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Aboard the QE2 and under the stars, three lives converge. Two physicists - Jove, a married man, and Alice, a single woman - meet and commence an affair, only for Alice to fall in love with Jove's wife, Stella, a poet. Winterson captures all three sides of this triangle of desire - and the rich history that has brought them together - with her prodigious passion and intellect. Encompassing ideas that reach from the Greeks to the Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) of modern physics, Winterson incorporates the entire universe from Liverpool to New York, from quarks to cosmos - in a novel of sex and the spirit, the real and the fantastic, male and female, science and religion, and love in all its frailty and excess.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal