BiblioAddict

On falling in love, falling out of love, killing a healthy horse then beating it with a stick, and wishing you could forget so many of the things you remember:

The Stone Gods
By Jeanette Winterson
Harcourt/April 2008
224 pps/$24.00

This book started off great. In fact, if you remember from a few posts ago, I said that it was virtually love, and it was. I loved everything about in the first two thirds of this book. This was my first Jeanette Winterson novel, but she impressed me as a smart and creative writer who wasn’t afraid to think outside of the box. It sounds corny, I know, but for someone who reads as much as I do, it was nice to face the unexpected on virtually every page. With its various narrative twists and turns, along with its often beautiful turns of phrases, The Stone Gods was one beautiful unpredictability after another.

I don’t usually attempt to summarize books, and in this case I think it would be virtually impossible. Impossible, at least, to do it in a way that would leave you knowing more about the book rather than less. I could, however, tell you that it’s about the fragility of life, and not only our lives but that of the planet. It’s about how, despite our good intentions, we may be doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again. It’s about how in the face of that inevitability we can only give the best we’ve got, and love no matter how short our time is. It’s about stories and their power to sustain us until humanity’s time on this planet is done.

But, then… that last third. I’m not sure what happened, but my opinion took a precipitous turn for the worse. Well, I could hazard a guess. It seemed as if, for the final third, Winterson turned the volume up of the book and everything that I’d previously liked about the novel suddenly seemed too shrill, too preachy, too out-of-the-box, too…everything. Winterson took a healthy horse and beat. It. To. Death. With a stick. Instead of the satisfied reluctance I usually turn the last page of a book I loved, I closed The Stone Gods with a “Good grief, I’m glad that’s over.”

And I was. I was incredibly relieved to close the book on The Stone Gods. But as with all novels that exhibit such promise in the beginning which isn’t fulfilled in the end, I was sorely disappointed. Such promise, so wasted. Luckily, the first two thirds of the book is comprised of stories that could stand alone from the last one. So, if I do return to this novel sometime in the future I’ll simply read those stories that I loved and pretend the last one doesn’t exist. In fact, I wish I could do that now.

P.S. Happy Independence Day, everyone!!!  May you eat much barbecue and see many colors in the sky this evening.