A groundbreaking writer finds a novel way to air her grievances
To paraphrase the writer Pankaj Mishra, we live in an age of partisan fury stoked by the blue flames (and blue checks) of social media. Online mobs are just a click away, stirring the pot on X and Substack, even in the comments on breaking news. Opinion journalism may be the most influential literary form in the United States, and novelists and poets have taken to mimicking political speech to engage with readers and grow their audiences.
There’s ample polemic in Jeanette Winterson’s genre-bending “One Aladdin Two Lamps,” channeling her anger at patriarchy in a reimagining of “One Thousand and One Nights,” which she refers to simply as “Nights.” Hers is a disquieting book, awash in Jenny Holzer-like slogans, memories of a strict evangelical childhood, stories jigsawed together and sudden, breathtaking insights, all framed by the myth of Shahrazad (known in the West as Scheherazade). Shahrazad, you’ll recall, cheated death by beguiling her husband, the Persian king Shahryar, who had enacted revenge on a deceitful wife by marrying and bedding a series of virgins, then beheading them at dawn. A brilliant storyteller, Shahrazad spun tales all night with cliffhangers that ensured her survival until the next evening. Shahryar was intrigued. So is Winterson; for her, Shahrazad is a model of feminist genius.
A groundbreaking novelist — “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit” and “Sexing the Cherry” are pillars of the queer canon — Winterson becomes the book’s Aladdin. She sees herself in the boy: Adopted by working-class evangelical parents, she came out as lesbian in her adolescence, her liberation a magic carpet that whisked her to a life she had scarcely imagined when she was checking books out of her local library. Her research draws us in. She maps out the centuries-old genealogy of “Nights,” its origins in China and later additions as the tales made their way west via India and the Islamic realm. The power of “Nights” lies in its versatile technique, stories as “long-form Open Sesame,” she writes, “that get us into the treasure and out of danger.”
“One Aladdin Two Lamps” revisits less-famous chapters in “Nights” — the porter and the “bawdy” ladies of Baghdad, Douban and the vizier, the City of Brass — often as window dressing for her opinions. The book blends Shahrazad’s narratives — sexual predators, a man targeted by a ticked-off demon, innocents morphed into cattle, corrupt rulers — with the author’s convictions. Her ad hominem attacks on men are grounded in cultural and historical realities; but for a writer committed to the gender spectrum, she seems aggressively binary. She sneers at husbands who betray their wives yet quotes the late poet Ted Hughes with admiration. She condemns the overturn of Roe v. Wade, failing to acknowledge the conservative women who rallied against abortion rights. “A woman’s world was tiny,” she declares. “It’s hard to think big when your world is tiny.” And yet, what of Emily Dickinson, who labored in the solitude of her Massachusetts bedroom, less than 200 square feet?
Winterson riffs on DNA, with “Nights” as the genetic code, or germ line, of narrative; the metaphor falls shy of its marks. There are bits about AI and Sam Altman, a few affecting set pieces on Christianity, then she lapses into clichés, such as: “Everything new begins with an act of imagination” and “The written word allows the best of us to be passed on.”
Despite these flaws, “One Aladdin Two Lamps” contains spectacular genies of its own, particularly when the author follows her intuition. Again and again Winterson surprises us. Her “Nights” unfold as a series of opinion pieces, with Shahrazad (and Winterson) as columnists advocating for social justice. She links class commentary to “Nights,” with storytelling a prized commodity not confined to elites but open to all, from every walk of life, an embarrassment of riches.
“Shahrazad’s tales, stuffed with detail, unraveling, tumbling over each other, growing taller in the telling like the jinn who so often appear, are not minimalist,” Winterson observes. “Stories piled on stories. A bazaar of excess. Wealth beyond the reach of avarice. … More diamonds than stars. It’s an inventory of bling.” Just when she locks on a platitude, she spooks us with a reversal, a balletic leap, connecting “Nights” to “Jane Eyre,” say, or inserting an aside on the etymology of “escape,” digressions true to the spirit of “Nights.”
“One Aladdin Two Lamps” works best as an interrogation of narrative, from layered plots to fanciful characters to fractured chronologies, the way words harmonize in sentences, answering the question Winterson poses: “What If?” She reminds us that stories not only shape-shift formally; they transfigure us as we move through the world — unseen, organic processes, like cells replaced in our bodies. Winterson insists on airing her grievances, yet it’s her textual acumen that impresses. “Reading deeply is not time wasted,” she notes. “Reading is time set apart to get closer to ourselves.”