Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

In any college lit class with a thematic focus, the novels start to blur together. Turn of the century American novels work over the same handful of themes, and approach them with a limited number of techniques. Same for my Queer Fictions class. Novels with LGBT protagonists are obsessed with the etiology of homosexuality. Though none will claim definitively that a gay person is born, made, or something else, they’re all willing to present the various arguments, starting from birth. (And sometimes before it, as in Well of Loneliness and Sacred Country.) This leads to a lot of point of view characters who are children. Writing from a kid’s perspective is difficult, because who the hell remembers what it was like to have a child’s psychology? Reading it can be even harder — have you ever listened to a kid tell a story? They’re not good at it. You’ll find guitar prodigies and third-grade strongmen but no baby Pynchons or li’l Cormac McCarthys (and goddamn you if you just thought of Christopher Paolini).

So good writers — and Jeanette Winterson is certainly one of those — have to perform an essentially impossible imaginative act in trying to inhabit the mind of a child from a distance of 20 years. Winterson reduces the degree of difficulty by telling a largely autobiographical story, but just because it was her youth doesn’t mean she really remembers it better than anybody else. Presentism is a real danger here, since the fact that you have the same name as the grade-school you implies some continuity, but in a real sense that iteration of yourself is gone, or at least so thoroughly fragmented that any attempt to piece it together is necessarily a distortion.

But of course distortion is fine: this is a novel, after all. In telling the story of her upbringing in a deeply religious community in northwest England, Winterson must decide how to present herself.

She goes with something like Lisa Simpson. Impossibly precocious, young Jeanette is surrounded by adults not half so clever as she. The tone is like anybody precocious you’ve ever met: clever, a little self-satisfied, and not very knowledgeable. The humor in this section is mostly of the “Kids Say the Darndest Things” variety — or, considering Jeanette’s fundamentalist upbringing, “From the Mouths of Babes”. So when the neighbors next door loudly commit the sin of fornication — to the horror of Jeanette’s mother and delight of Mrs. White, who goes racing for a wine glass to press against the wall — Jeanette can’t understand why:

But why was it so noisy? Most sins you did quietly so as not to get caught.

Har har, kids’re funny.

The story does better when it abandons the picaresque as Jeanette matures, and the humor that does work is much-appreciated, considering how understandably dour growing-up-gay narratives can be. I praised Giovanni’s Room for being short, and the same goes for Oranges; it’s light reading and maintains a sense of levity about it. Winterson does so with humor, but also interrupts the narrative with straight fables about Perceval, or a prince looking for the kingdom’s most perfect woman. In appropriating such a classic format and redeploying it in a story about a lesbian — there certainly aren’t any fairy tales about princesses searching for a beautiful peasant girl to take as their lover — Winterson produces some of the novel’s strongest moments when the novel proper isn’t even happening. My favorite was a flight of fancy in which Jeanette imagines the Biblical emperor Tetrahedron as a many-faced man:

Read it at Amazon (search Tetrahedron)

That last line: no emotion is the final one, is a nice callback to the very first book I reviewed, way back in ’07: The End of Mr. Y. “This is not the end of history. We are all wrong.”

You might remember me saying something about how these books tend to run together. There are points of departure. Oranges consciously separates itself from books like Maurice and Well of Loneliness by backgrounding Jeanette’s sexuality. Maurice and Well were trailblazers by frankly dealing with homosexuality during the early part of the 20th century. Winterson, writing in the 1980s, didn’t have to focus the entire book around it, because society had mostly acknowledged that gays weren’t hobgoblins. So she can have Jeanette’s relationships be plot points, but not bend the entire narrative to accommodate them. It’s refreshing, since these thematically unified courses tend to get dreary when you’re being hit with book after book on the same topic. Oranges is actually much more about issues of class, maturation, and religiosity than it is homosexuality. It gives me a breather, plus it points out that stories with gay characters don’t necessarily have to be about being gay, a useful reminder that artists can engage whatever topic is important to them, and not just the traits that place them on the skinny end of the bell curve.