SOURCE: Ducornet, Rikki. “Fairy Tales for Grown-Ups.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (23 April 1995): 1, 9.

In the following negative review, Ducornet criticizes Art and Lies, faulting the novel's “excess and pedantry.”

Art and Lies opens with light, a generative thread that precipitates the sprawling world of matter: A train, wheels, overcoats, windows, brooches and a man. Homeless, loveless, self-hating, remorseful—he is a shadowman too self-absorbed to notice the light that burns his clothes and illuminates his face, the light pouring down his shoulders with biblical zeal. And the book opens with a ringing bell that over time will transform to a diving bell or sounding bell—as we enter a deep water in which the soul of man is to be revealed, tested and saved: “It's not too late.”

Winterson's take on genesis, an act of necromancy, of aesthetic will, opens what promises to be a lovely, astonishing novel...