Jeanette Winterson’s Playful New Novel Offers Thoughts on Mad Science and Sexbots

“Frankissstein” is not a particularly good novel, if we limit our definition of a good novel to one that, at minimum, has characters and/or a plot in which one feels invested. Winterson seems to know she’s boxed herself into a facile and jokey situation, and she’s decided to shoot herself out of the corner. This novel is talky, smart, anarchic and quite sexy. You begin to linger on those three s’s when you speak the title aloud.

“Frankissstein” also has, if you squint just slightly, an intelligent soul. Winterson has always been interested in gender fluidity and there is room, in our glimpses of Ry, for real feeling between the satire and bickering.

Ian McEwan published his robot-sex novel, “Machines Like Us,” earlier this year. (A male robot’s breath, in bed, smelled like “the back of a warm TV set.”) The Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi updated Shelley’s novel with dark grace in “Frankenstein in Baghdad,” published in English last year. It’s about a man who collects body parts after car bombs detonate, and then gets out his needle and thread.

Winterson is playing a game that’s entirely her own. The fourth wall is broken frequently, as if this were an episode of “Fleabag.” After one bit of dialogue from Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister, there’s an author’s note in all caps that reads: “This is the most profound thing Claire has said in her life.”

As the jokes and bon mots and aphorisms (“Love is a disturbance among the disturbed,” “Human beings can’t share. We can’t even share free bicycles”) fly past, the book is anchored in soliloquies that wear their intent and erudition lightly.

In our robotic future, Victor says, “Humans will be like decayed gentry. We’ll have the glorious mansion called the past that is falling into disrepair. We’ll have a piece of land that we didn’t look after very well called the planet. And we’ll have some nice clothes and a lot of stories. We’ll be fading aristocracy. We’ll be Blanche Dubois in a moth-eaten silk dress. We’ll be Marie Antoinette with no cake.”

“Frankissstein” has its grayer moments, especially in the sometimes draggy metaphysical conversations between the Shelleys and Byron. These scenes are short.

If sex dolls are on humanity’s horizon, Winterson reminds us with one of her chapter titles (“Looking for a lover who won’t blow my cover”) that there’s an Eagles lyric for that, too.