SOURCE: Sexton, David. “A Serious Case of Solipsism.” Spectator 278 (4 January 1997): 27, 30.

In the following negative review, Sexton argues that the imagery and syntax of Gut Symmetries alienates its core audience.

Plainly, Granta Books was right to purchase an established name to spearhead its re-launch as an independent publisher. That Jeanette Winterson was the ideal recruit for the role is less obvious.

Although she still enjoys considerable fame, she has used it primarily in the last few years to make herself a figure of derision: naming herself as the greatest living writer in a poll, choosing her own work as her book of the year, proclaiming herself the only true heir to Virginia Woolf, and, famously, door-stepping journalists who have had the cheek to offer criticism of such vanity.

If these aberrations were, for some reason, genuinely necessary to keeping her confidence up and her talent intact, they would not...