Jeanette Winterson: The.Powerbook

Random House $54.95)

Review: Alison Jones*

It is fashionable for some to mock post-modernism; others take pleasure in using the odd markers which have come to signal it, whatever it is.

In this book there are the full stops where they are least expected (in The.Title, for instance), the fragmented narrative, the playing in cyberspace with time and gender, the dedication to Peggy Reynolds - all alongside a plain, old-fashioned, modern love story.

Winterson's latest work weaves together story-fragments to form a slight, though engaging, tale shot through with the bitter-sweet taste of a doomed erotic encounter.

The main story traverses the fraught terrain of desire and sex between a straight woman and a lesbian, and the rawness of Winterson's text feels as if her source material comes out of her personal diary.

She is, as usual, a clever writer: she is as comfortable with sassy, staccato dialogue between lovers in a Paris cafe as she is with descriptions of children playing frisbee in the streets of Capri, Mallory and Irving dying on Mt Everest, or a transvestite adventure during the tulip fever in Holland in the 1600s.

She is just as easily a man or a woman, gay or straight, or a woman being a man. She ducks and dives with speedy enthusiasm and intelligence, and with beautifully economic prose, through stories that take the reader in close to the bodies and desires of her diverse characters. They appear almost at random, as though the computer threw them up on her PowerBook, out of its belly.

We feel the author's pleasure at engaging with her screen and its possibilities: "There are so many lives packed into one. The one life we think we know is only the window open on the screen. Time is downloaded into our bodies."

The book cover announces that The.PowerBook is an astonishing achievement.

I enjoyed it for an afternoon's entertainment, just as I enjoy the circus, the internet, post-modernism.

There are intriguing glimpses and juxtapositions, passions, truths, possibilities, movement. But astonishing? That depends on whether you are thrilled by the rush of images, the insubstantial, fleeting wonders of contemporary cyberspace.

It is certainly a book of its time.

* Alison Jones lectures in education at the University of Auckland.