“My nipples are like the teats of a rain-god,” the writer Mary Shelley (1797-1851) declares on the third page of Jeanette Winterson’s new novel, “Frankissstein.” This is perhaps not a typical way to begin a book review. This is not a typical novel.

One knows it isn’t typical right away, with its epigraph. Not enough study has been put into the quotations at the fronts of novels. Typically, in literary fiction, epigraphs are gloomy, perhaps some Hannah Arendt or Robert Oppenheimer or Nietzsche. These sentences will often be followed with a lyric from Radiohead or P.J. Harvey or a similar act, to demonstrate that the author is down with the Coachella and Glastonbury masses. Sometimes there will be a terse, final, so-dumb-it’s-smart snippet from someone like Lorena Bobbitt or the Big Bopper or PewDiePie, to cut the funk like smelling salts.

The sole epigraph in “Frankissstein” is from the Eagles. No one quotes the Eagles. The line Winterson has selected, “We may lose and we may win though we will never be here again,” is from “Take It Easy.” Poke fun if you will. (I was prepared.) Those 14 words are, on reconsideration, nearly as profound as anything attributed to Confucius or Gandhi. And they rhyme.

So far, so weird. You begin reading “Frankissstein” picturing a monster with bolts in its neck (the Eagles) and those thoughts mix with your sense of Shelley’s Gothic novel, “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,” published in 1818. Once those things have been mentally stitched together — not that the Eagles play much more of a role here — a writer can go anywhere. Winterson does. In this novel, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, she walks her wits on a very long leash.