Gut Symmetries is a beautifully written love triangle involving two physicists and a poet. It's a romance between science and mythology. Jove and Stella seem like an odd couple, the scientist and the poet, who knew each other since they were children and are destined to be together. Jove and Alice look like an obvious story, the older man and the young pupil. These two pairings seem like things we should understand - things get interesting when Stella meets Alice. Instead of jealousy and anger the two women begin a relationship of their own.
Jove is a self centered man, who never imagined the women in his life existing beyond him. Stella and Alice had expectations about who the other was going to be, but they surprise each other. As their relationship blossoms they move away from Jove's influence.
There is one line from the first time Alice and Stella first had sex that I really appreciated. Winterson writes that, "Desiring her I felt my own desirability. It was an act of power but not power over her. I was my own conquest." It really resonated as to why women appreciating each other can be a huge thing in a patriarchal male gaze world.
The beginning was slow, but it picks up as it starts to explore the world around the characters, how they got to the tangled mess of their relationship, and how their lives got them to this place. Winterson starts catching us up with action that has already happened. The plot doesn't provide much forward momentum until close to the end.
Winterson comments on the nature of the novel that she's creating. As her character relays her own past, Winterson writes, "I should have preferred it to be neater, tauter, the pace of a mystery, the thrill of a romance. What I had were fragments of colored glass held up to the light . . . This is my signal flashing towards you." They're absolutely beautiful fragments.
The ending gets a bit gory, but always wrapped in beautiful imagery. The prose is consistently wonderful. Winterson uses the language of science and mythology to draw up an intricate world.
The chapters get their titles from tarot cards. Winterson juxtaposes the ways science and mysticism think about how the world is bound together. She incorporates physics into her poetry. She uses superstring theory as metaphor, and the novel gets its title from GUT symmetries, a concept that I'll admit to not absorbing the science of. She discusses planetary movements in terms of both science and astrology, all getting to the idea that the universe works in a way that is larger than any one person.
Stella and Alice and Jove are their own actors, but also their families and heritage. The world she describes works within systems. There are patterns that are older than people, bound to repeat, or maybe not. Winterson writes that:
"In the Torah, the Hebrew 'to know,' often used in a sexual context, is not about facts but about connections. Knowledge, not as accumulation, but as charge and discharge. A release of energy from one site to another. Instead of a hoard of certainties, bug-collected, to make me feel secure, I can give up taxonomy and invite myself to the dance: the patterns, rhythms, multiplicities, paradoxes, shifts, currents, cross-currents, irregularities, irrationalities, geniuses, joints, pivots, worked over time, and through time, to find the lines of thought that still transmit."
In Gut Symmetries Winterson explores the dance between a world with rules and repetition, and a world with spontaneity and love change who people are.
