Announcing Her Existence
By STACEY D'ERASMO
Published: January 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/books/review/DErasmo-t.htm?_r=1Fiction that attempts to contemplate this state of affairs is still rare, although the success of Jeffrey Eugenides's "Middlesex" suggests that the plasticity of gender touches a nerve in many readers. Still, the same multiplicity that offers so much to the writer also comes with obstacles. Sexual politics, medicine and sociology press hard on the subject, all bearing claims and arguments. A transgender or intersex character may open up many possibilities, but narrative is often anxious for closure, and so are readers. Moreover, and perhaps toughest to manage, is the hunger to decide what gender means and the concomitant insistence that it must mean something. We like to think of gender as a noun; we have a hard time understanding that it can be a verb as well. All of which is a long way round of saying that Kathleen Winter's first novel, "Annabel" — a No. 1 best seller in Canada — is absorbing, earnest and in many respects quite beautifully written, but as often as it tries to fly into the open space that gender ambiguity creates, it is pulled back by convictions and assumptions that contradict, and deaden, its richer aspirations. Gender and desire want to ramble, but Winter dutifully presses them into the service of a feminist parable, depriving her story of much of its anarchic, unpredictable force.
