Outside Reading: Book Review #1

Book Review: "Sibling Rivalry"

by Jenaette Winterson

published October 1, 2010

          Jeanette Winterson’s book review, “Sibling Rivalry,” discusses Cunningham’s novel, “By Nightfall,” with a formalistic approach, arguing that he has an extremely effective writing style.  The writer easily accomplishes her goal of convincing the reader this by noticing a multitude of elements in the piece and how they enhance the writing. When she analyzes the use of syntax, she explains how the sentence structure creates a perfect pace of reading and keeps the novel alive. In another paragraph Winterson notices the way the author “externalizes [the novel’s] agonies” which puts us in the character’s head so that we can “look out at his life” (2). This review hardly gives away any of the book, while still persuading a reader of its interesting plot and style. 

         The most prominent critical approach used in this review is Formalism. Winterson picks apart this novel based on literary elements in it, including symbols, plot, dialogue, and many others. She begins to support her argument by describing the opening of the book with an animal sacrifice, symbolizing the losses and mistakes of the main character’s life, to introduce the reader to the main idea of the story. Then she talks about the “simple, potent plot” the author uses, allowing him to focus on “the hearts and minds, the groins and guts, of his characters,” while not boring the readers and keeping them anxious for more (2). Dialogue and sentence length, according to Winterson, are also skillfully mastered, with sentences “stretched or contracted at just the right time” (2). Towards the end of the review, the writer analyzes the way Cunningham concludes the novel, by using a second sacrifice like the one from the beginning. Although this time it’s a human sacrificed instead an animal, to completely wrap up a theme of the novel about letting things go about ourselves in order to grow up. 

           There also seems to be an emphasis in this book review about the allusions to Shakespeare, which Foster explained in “How to Read Literature Like a Professor” that almost everything is based off of Shakespeare’s work. The first allusion noticed by Winterson is the plot about the surprise arrival of a person bringing “chaos, self-knowledge, tragedy, [and] the ruin of one kind of life” not necessarily leading to a better one (2). She notices that the same plot is used in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”  There is also a “gender swap confusion” when the main character mistakes the male guest in the shower for a young beautiful version of his wife (3). This common Shakespearean plot spin occurs in “Twelfth Night” with Viola and Sebastian, and in “As You Like It” with Rosalind. 

          By examining many literary elements and Shakespeare allusions, Jeanette Winterson effectively convinces the reader of this novel’s excellence.