Written on the Body
A love story told by a narrator with no name and no specified gender, a formal choice that makes the love feel universal rather than particular. Winterson writes about the body of the beloved with the reverence of a love letter and the precision of a medical text, often in the same sentence. Beautiful and formally radical.
Some readers find the unnamed narrator's fixation on Louise exhausting rather than moving, with one reviewer stating flatly, “I found this insufferably narcissistic and eye-rolling to read.” Louise herself draws separate criticism as thin, reading more as an object of the narrator's prose than a person with her own interior life. A recurring complaint is that a late medical turn in the plot feels bolted onto the love story for effect rather than earned by everything before it, and some say Winterson's style tips from lyrical into indulgent. One reviewer, a writer themselves, admits the craft falls short despite real talent: “I just think she is fumbling and kind of incompetent.” Readers expecting an explicit, plot-driven account of the affair are thrown by how abstract the body descriptions turn out, and some call the ending abrupt, wanting resolution instead of ambiguity.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
