Yesterday, as I was considering how to begin my review of The PowerBook, a friend spotted the book on my coffee table. "Jeanette Winterson!" she exclaimed. "She's a great writer." I agreed, and we got to talking, and we found that we had both been disappointed by Winterson's recent work. My friend then picked up The PowerBook, opened to a page at random, and read aloud:

You are a looking-glass world. You are the hidden place that opens to me on the other side of the glass. I touch your smooth surface and then my fingers sink through to the other side. You are what the mirror reflects and invents. I see myself, I see you, two, one, none.

"That could be a quote from any one of her novels," I observed.

"Exactly," said my friend. And I realized what had been bothering me all along.

Jeanette Winterson is a formidably gifted writer, and I mean formidable in the sense of inspiring respect and awe, but also in the sense of difficult to overcome. Because her great strengths — which include a keen intellect mixed with an affinity for new ideas, a facility with language, and the ease of a born storyteller — can also work against her, as I'm sorry to say they do here.

The PowerBook is a loosely constructed work that centers on Ali, a writer who bears no small resemblance to Winterson herself. In the evenings Ali turns on her computer and spins out stories, moving as freely through history, legend, and geography as she does through cyberspace, looking for the lover she keeps writing about. This lover appears sometimes as "she," sometimes as "you," and sometimes as any of a host of famous or invented characters (Guinevere to Ali's Lancelot, Paolo to Ali's Francesca, etc.) from the world's wealth of "great and ruinous lovers." Sometimes this lover drops out of the novel entirely, and it's hard to tell if we are still reading about Ali or just tripping through yet another story that is unconnected to the rest. As a whole, the novel has all the cohesiveness of the world wide web — a comparison Winterson invites, via repeated references to the internet and her computer — wherein a mighty conglomeration of stories and facts coexist, and what you think is an innocent click may take you someplace altogether different from where you were before. As Ali warns, "'If I start this story, it may change under my hands.'"