For someone who espoused a return to the "simple" life of non-technology, who lived for a while in a log cabin, chopping her own wood for heating, Jeanette Winterson sure knows how to work technology to her advantage in her intriguing novel, The Powerbook.
The Powerbook follows a protagonist who can take on the persona of your individual fantasy, weaving a story to enchant you using only her powerbook laptop computer and her vivid imagination. Ali writes stories "on demand". But to entertain you she may just weave you into a story until the lines between reality and imagination are blurred. Who are you? Who is she? Do you exist in another time and place outside yourself? Or is this all really just a figment of Ali's imagination?
Cleverly written as a series of linked short stories, The Powerbook pulls you along its tale. Is this the same client, dissatisfied with one story, so demanding that Ali keep telling and retelling her tale until it satisfies?
The Powerbook reminded me a little of Winterson's Written on the Body in that the story is told primarily from the viewpoint of an androgynous first person, clearly obsessed with the woman who is the object of desire. The series of unfulfilled storylines between the narrator and the object of its affection mimics the futility of real-life relationships between people who find it difficult to communicate on an emotional level.
Sex can take you only so far. In The Powerbook, Winterson returns to the adage that all sex truly happens between the ears, in the mind. As Ali takes her patron to imagined lives, we see the truth of this statement. In her anonymously intimate writings, Ali tries to take the statement one step further and prove that relationships can only purely be expressed in words, and not necessarily in actions.
Ali's seemed inability to exist outside of the worlds she creates on her Powerbook is a cruel statement on a society where people seem to only be able to communicate via electronic messages. And a cynical conjecture on where our society is headed in its lessened ability to interact on a personal basis.
