ABSTRACT
Consider the expression “love triangle:” the triangle is a spatial metaphor that captures the relationship between three individuals. The novels examined in this chapter—Jonathan Lethem's As She Climbed Across the Table and Jeanette Winterson's Gut Symmetries (both published in 1997)—foreground geometrical forms by comparing the characters' relationship to a chain and a triangle respectively. Both novels belong to the genre of “lab lit,” realist fiction centering on scientists and exploring levels of reality beyond the human scale. The chapter's claim is that Lethem and Winterson use spatial abstraction as a probe into a world of nonhuman things and processes.
