SOURCE: Alter, Robert. “Sexing the Jewry.” New Republic (7 April 1997): 36–38.

In the following review, Alter faults the stereotypical characterizations and the accuracy of the scientific information in Gut Symmetries.

[Gut Symmetries] is the sixth novel by Jeanette Winterson, a young British writer who has frequently been celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic as the bright new light of English fiction. She has happily embraced this judgment: on at least two occasions, when asked to choose the best work of fiction to have appeared in England during the previous year, she confessed that she could think of nothing that equaled the richness of her own most recent book.

But one should not hold a writer's self-promotion against her. (In the words of Hillel the Elder, “If I am not for myself, who is for me?”) Jeanette Winterson is a writer who has a genuine passion about the revelatory experience...