The Books: “Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit” (Jeanette Winterson)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson

Oh, Jeanette Winterson, you crazy egomaniacal sometimes-brilliant sometimes-infuriating lesbian … how I love you and how you drive me crazy! My relationship with you is akin to my relationship to Tori Amos. I was so into Tori’s early albums and then she went off the deep end for a good decade – and now – hoorah – she’s back – I LOVE her latest album … but I loved her earlier albums so much that I stuck with her, through her experimental years, as boring as I found all of that. There aren’t too many artists I do that for. Margaret Atwood is another one. I’ll read all your books, lady, even when you bore me to tears – just based on, oh, Bodily Harm alone (excerpt here)!!

Jeanette Winterson burst onto the literary scene like a comet shooting towards earth from another galaxy. At least that’s how I remember it. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is her first book and it won the Whitbread prize for “first fiction” – and her novels that followed (which I’ll get to when I get to) were mind-blowing. She became a star. A huge star. She writes with absolute certainty of her own gifts. She’s a writer, sure, but more than that: she’s a showman. She glories in her own powers of creation. She can be like Joyce in that way. She was asked once who her favorite writer was – and she said, “Jeanette Winterson.” Reminiscent of Joyce’s response to the question: “Who is your favorite writer in the English language?”: “Well, aside from myself I don’t know.” It is not popular to be so openly arrogant. It rubs people the wrong way. But that’s okay. It’s not the artist’s job to be a nice polite person who plays by society’s rules. And so sometimes (in her later books) that showmanship turns into an obnoxious quality – especially when the book in question doesn’t hold up … but those first couple of books? Holy shit. You read them and just follow her on her magical path – you can’t help it. Just surrender. You really have no choice. She’ll strong-arm you into loving her, either way. The New York Review of Books said about Oranges:

The overwhelming impression of her work is one of remarkable self-confidence, and she evidently thrives on risk…. As good as Poe: it dares you to laugh and stares you down.

It does have a very aggressive quality to it, her writing. Self-confidence as aggression. And yes, she seems to follow her own star – which involves risk. She doesn’t care about how books are supposed to go … she does her own thing. Oranges is, for all intents and purposes, a memoir – about her childhood growing up with evangelical missionaries – knowing that she was “called” to spread the word of God … but then discovering that she liked girls, instead of boys. Perhaps that means that she is even more called to greatness, since it goes against the grain – but her fanatic parents do not see it that way, and her discovery of her sexuality and her preferences destroys the family. She ends up running away.

Now with Jeanette Winterson, you can never be sure what is true and what is not true. And it ends up not really mattering. (Perhaps because she’s a way better writer than, oh, Mr. James Frey.) The narrator of Oranges is named Jeanette. And her early author biographies in her first books are very funny snarky paragraphs – like: “Jeanette Winterson thought she would be an evangelical Christian her whole life, but then ran away and joined the circus.” I’m exaggerating – but not all that much. She seems to thrive on self-creation, meaning: her persona, as a writer, is bold, funny, irreverent – and untruthful. You cannot trust her. But you do not care. (This becomes a main theme of my favorite of her books: The Passion. In that, the web-footed cross-dressing redhead keeps assuring us, the reader, “I’m telling you the truth. Trust me.”)

The press that she got in the beginning, the reviews, were the things authors dream of. She was compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The greats. She did not seem to limit herself. She was not bound by the so-called laws of fiction. She would intersperse her narratives with haunting fairy tales, quite terrifying, or stories that sound like Biblical parables. She had no fear.

I LOVE her early stuff. I have friends who really dig her “middle” stuff – which I find interminable and self-indulgent … but that just goes to show you that it is very difficult to be neutral about Jeanette Winterson. She is polarizing. And judging from some of the stories about her real life, and her dramas (posing nude for one of her author photos) – she’s a trip. The first book of hers that I read was The Passion and it remains, to this day, one of my favorite books of all time. It was enough to make me a Jeanette Winterson fan forever. Through thick and thin, girl. I’ll read you.

I am so so glad to read her last two books – which seem to be a reversion to what she does best (in my opinion): create magical realities, mixing fairy tale and present-day settings … but I’ll get to those.

Jeanette Winterson weathered the storms of her bad reviews – which began with her book Art and Lies – it was like people were disappointed by her, and took her experimentations personally. I wasn’t sure she would be forgiven. But she just kept writing what she wanted to write. On the strength of her earlier books, her reputation remained, despite the fact that she seemed to have gone a bit nuts (there was a huge Vanity Fair piece about her, I recall, which made her sound like a walking-talking psychodrama) – and, what can I say, I’ll read whatever that lady writes. And sometimes I’m bored, sometimes I’m pissed … but anyone who can write a book like The Passion will have my attention forever. Seriously.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-of-age story. Jeanette’s mother is completely wacko. Jeanette grows up in a hothouse Jesus Camp atmosphere in the Midlands of England … homeschooled, and sent out every weekend to stand on street corners passing out tracts. Eventually, she is forced to go to school … and it is then that she begins to realize her attraction to her own sex. All hell begins to break loose. But it’s not the story that is the stand-out here. It’s the writing. It’s not poetic writing, or flowery, or nostalgic … it’s not beautiful. It’s one of those rare rare moments in life when you read a writer and you think: Wow. This is truly a distinctive voice.

Jeanette Winterson has her own voice, and I feel like I would recognize it anywhere. She lulls you into a sense of complacency, making you feel like, “Oh, okay, I know where I am, I know what kind of book this is …” and then, with a quick jujitsu move, she rips out the carpet, and tells you a fairy tale. That ends horribly. Or she suddenly adds a magical element – and you are not sure what is real anymore.

I can’t believe I haven’t written more about Jeanette Winterson – and I’d be VERY interested to hear thoughts from other people like myself who have been reading her for years. She has PASSIONATE fans (of which I am one, despite my reservations about those damn middle books) … and people really give a shit about her, and what she’s working on. She’s one of the few writers where I hear she has a new book coming out, and I pre-Order it, to make sure I get it on the damn day it comes out. There can be no waiting for Jeanette Winterson. I cannot WAIT around for the right time to buy her book. I must have it first. And I will drop everything else to read it.

She’s not like anybody else.

Here’s an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson

It was in this way that I began my education: she taught me to read from the Book of Deuteronomy, and she told me all about the lives of the saints, how they were really wicked, and given to nameless desires. Not fit for worship; this was yet another heresy of the Catholic Church and I was not to be misled by the smooth tongues of priests.

‘But I never see any priests.’

‘A girl’s motto is BE PREPARED.’

I learnt that it rains when clouds collide with a high building, like a steeple, or a cathedral; the impact punctures them, and everybody underneath gets wet. This was why, in the old days, when the only tall buildings were holy, people used to say cleanliness is next to godliness. The more godly your town, the more high buildings you’d have, and the more rain you’d get.

‘That’s why all these Heathen places are so dry,’ explained my mother, then she looked into space, and her pencil quivered. ‘Poor Pastor Spratt.’

I discovered that everything in the natural world was a symbol of the Great Struggle between good and evil. ‘Consider the mamba,’ said my mother. ‘Over short distances the mamba can outrun a horse.’ And she drew the race on a sheet of paper. She meant that in the short term, evil can triumph, but never for very long. We were very glad, and we sang our favourite hymn, Yield Not To Temptation.

I asked my mother to teach my French, but her face clouded over, and she said she couldn’t.

‘Why not?’

‘It was nearly my downfall.’

‘What do you mean?’ I persisted, whenever I could. But she only shook her head and muttered something about me being too young, that I’d find out all too soon, that it was nasty.

‘One day,’ she said finally, ‘I’ll tell you about Pierre,’ then she switched on the radio and ignored me for so long that I went back to bed.

Quite often, she’d start to tell me a story and then go on to something else in the middle, so I never found out what happened to the Earthly Paradise when it stopped being off the coast of India, and I was stuck at ‘six sevens are forty-two’ for almost a week.

‘Why don’t I go to school?’ I asked her. I was curious about school because my mother always called it a Breeding Ground. I didn’t know what she meant, but I knew it was a bad thing, like Unnatural Passions. ‘They’ll lead you astray,’ was the only answer I got.

I thought about all this in the toilet. It was outside, and I hated having to go at night because of the spiders that came over from the coal-shed. My dad and me always seemed to be in the toilet, me sitting on my hands and humming, and him standing up, I supposed. My mother got very angry.

‘You come on in, it doesn’t take that long.’

But it was the only place to go. We all shared the same bedroom, because my mother was building us a bathroom in the back, and eventually, if she got the partition fitted, a little half-room for me. She worked very slowly though, because she said she had a lot on her mind. Sometimes Mrs White came round to help mix the grout, but then they’d both end up listening to Johnny Cash, or writing a new hand-out on Baptism by Total Immersion. She did finish eventually, but not for three years.

Meanwhile, my lessons continued. I learnt about Horticulture and Garden Pests via the slugs and my mother’s seed catalogues, and I developed an understanding of Historical Process through the prophecies in the Book of Revelation, and a magazine called The Plain Truth, which my mother received each week.

‘It’s Elijah in our midst again,’ she declared.

And so I learned to interpret the signs and wonders that the unbeliever might never understand.

‘You’ll need to when you’re out there on the mission field,’ she reminded me.

Then, one morning, when we had got up early to listen to Ivan Popov from behind the Iron Curtain, a fat brown envelope plopped through the letter box. My mother thought it was letters of thanks from those who had attended our Healing of the Sick crusade in the town hall. She ripped it open, then her face fell.

‘What is it?’ I asked her.

‘It’s about you.’

‘What about me?’

‘I have to send you to school.’

I whizzed into the toilet and sat on my hands; the Breeding Ground at last.