Gut Symmetries is composed for most of its length by the two women s monologues. It is hard to tell their voices apart. The surprise is not that there is convergence, but that there was ever supposed to be contrast. Jove, when he pipes up near the end of the book, repeats incantatory phrases from the other monologues, such as stardust that you are . The opposition between the poet and the two physicists, never great, dwindles to nothing when it turns out that Stella s Kabbalist father, in Austria before the war, had corresponded with scientists working on quantum theory.
All novelists traffic in the uncertainty principle, but some are more uncertain than others.
When at the exact mid-point of the book Stella and Alice meet as antagonists, the abruptness with which they develop first rapport and then erotic intimacy makes Iris Murdoch seem like the grittiest of realists. But then Murdoch in her writing about emotion is a realistic unrealist, heightening so as to reveal essences, whereas Winterson is an unrealistic unrealist, seeking to create wisdom literature, transformational prose with designs beyond the secular.