SOURCE: Wood, James. “Beware of Shallowness.” London Review of Books 16, no. 13 (7 July 1994): 9.

In the following review, Wood offers a negative assessment of Art and Lies, highlighting the changes in Winterson's prose style since the publication of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

Each new book by Jeanette Winterson is said to be poorer than its predecessor; she is like a bibliographer's definition of nostalgia. As her novels become more ghostly, so they give off a stronger vapour of self-promotion. Her last, Written on the Body, announced on its cover that it had ‘fused mathematical exactness and poetic intensity and made language new.’ Her latest also bears a Winterson-accented description on its jacket: ‘Art & Lies is a rich book, bawdy and beautiful, shocking because of its beauty … a dangerous book, banked with ideas forced out of the words themselves, not words for things, but words that are living things...