It is much easier to write a scalding review than a laudatory one-this is a basic truth that starry-eyed, would-be reviewers like myself find out fairly early in our careers or else risk sinking to the bottom of the uncompromisingly competitive literary barrel. Start an article with "brilliant," and the best you can hope for is a blurb on the back of a trashy paperback or, if you are a reviewer for The Student, nothing more than cursory glances from your most loyal public-your roommates. No one really knows why this is, but everyone, even that delightful go-for-the-jugular reviewer Randall Jarrell, loses steam when trying to say something nice about a writer. It seems that it is better to say nothing than to say something merely "nice."

Being a quick study (it only took me 20 years), I figured out that what the public hungers for is blood, preferably in large amounts and with a couple of raw nerve endings quivering here and there for variation. And this is what set my maidenly heart all aflutter after I finished reading Jeanette Winterson's latest novel "The.PowerBook" (due out in the United States on Oct. 24)-here finally was the chance for my as-yet-untested-though-doubtlessly-biting wit to have free reign.

Here I could rant and rave and throw around phrases such as "reads like a computer manual on bad ecstasy-incomprehensibly romantic, tediously erotic, with pretensions to real meaning yet, at the end, frustrating and climaxless," or "an affected work that echoes the worst of Virginia Woolf in its best moments and the best of Harlequin Romance in its worst," and actually be applauded (or at least read).

So it should be easy then, beginning with the end and working forward (Winterson claims plots are relics of the 20th century and abandons them in favor of the circular narrative, so I figure I can start wherever strikes my fancy) to point out the flaws in the story structure. Faults like Winterson's penchant for interspersing purposeless historical, mythical or cultural tales into the mainframe narrative. Is Winterson in full seriousness trying to compare her dim-witted lovers to Lancelot du Lac and Guinevere and to Paolo and Francesca da Rimini? I'd prefer to think that Winterson still retains some humility and these forays into mythic rewritings are simply excises from an academic novel-in-progress that accidentally slipped into Winterson's narrative-these things do happen.

Certainly there are touches of genuine humor in Winterson's novel. Especially in the story of the woman who, through "a little horticultural grafting" of two tulip bulbs and a stem, turns into a fully functional male with a "centrepiece" that is "about eight inches long, plump, with a nice weight to it." Despite the ridiculous situation, this pastiche actually works as a gentle and unobtrusively funny parody; the story proceeds with hardly an extraneous word-quite a feat for Ms. Winterson-and ends in a rather charmingly direct statement: "all afternoon I fucked her."

After all, this is art, not telephone sex, as Alix points out to her lover, so we have to inject a little realism into all this heady magic and androgyny, to throw us off guard and surprise us into laughter. Unfortunately Winterson hardly allows us to marvel at her beautiful and strange invention, and in the very next chapter hustles us into another one of her infamous, though dated, bisexual love triangles.

At the heart (or should I say hard drive?) of the story is the love affair between the narrator, an e-writer who plays with her gender and her name, dropping an 'x' from Alix and adding a penis whenever the situation calls for it, and an unnamed married woman. After a brief email courtship, where Alix promises "freedom for a night" (sounds to me like a bad porn ad, but to Winterson it represents the crucial element of sovereignty absent in a heterosexual relationship), the lovers are off to various romantic locations such as Capri and Paris. In the spirit of all interactive stories, Winterson offers two endings. Interesting proposition. Unfortunately she does not add the ending I would have particularly enjoyed-having the insufferable lovers leap hand in hand to their death from the top of a burning 25-story building.

"Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and I'm not quite sure why I am doing it," Alix muses sagely, and I quite agree with her-reading this book is like lifting a heavy stone-not worth the effort. But the worst part is actually not even the effort involved, but all those little centipedes and pincher bugs that you discover crawling about under the stone. There should at least be a hidden treasure to reward us for our misery, not this gaudily shining fools' gold that Winterson likes to pass off as "poetry in prose."

The novel does indeed resemble the Internet, though probably not in the way Winterson intended. As with the Web, we have to wade through a lot of garbage before finding the right link, though in this case the right link happens to be a chapter entitled, aptly enough, "Empty Trash." It is a portrait of Alix's "muck-solid, muck-sure" parents who were "the kind of people who kept a rabbit's paw in each pocket and a crucifix round the neck, just in case."

Showcasing Winterson's deft touch with language, metaphor and fairy-tale this chapter echoes the ingenuous magic of "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" and parts of "The Passion." Unfortunately it is brief and, as with all of Winterson's asides, fails to make a meaningful connection with the rest of the story.

I see that by trying to be scrupulously fair to Winterson's novel, I have failed in my primary objective, and the public will have to be satisfied with a few wisps of hair and some scraps of clothing-after all, one cannot wring blood from a lifeless piece of circuitry.

Ultimately, Winterson doesn't deserve to be left beaten and bloody, because her work is as harmless bit of literary fluff as written by any struggling amateur. And that is perhaps the harshest criticism anyone can bestow, though it is not in the least bit funny.