Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

[lightreads]

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


About 15% in, I said in tones of astonishment to my girlfriend, "dude, the book your dad got me for Christmas is actually good." Bless his heart, but this is the man who unironically and wholeheartedly believes that Smallville is good television and Twilight is a wonderful series. Not like there's anything in the world wrong with loving things. It's just really surprising the number of otherwise intelligent people who have never realized there's a difference between 'pleasurable' and 'good.'

Not actually a tangent. This is an ostensible spy novel about a beautiful woman working for the British security services in the early 70's who begins an affair with the author/target she's cultivating. She's not terribly bright and she's the sort of reader who enjoys most things and understands almost none of them. The book is about that, largely, reading the narratives around you. Or in her case, failing to.

It's beautifully written, if there was any doubt. McEwan reminds me of Margaret Atwood on the level of sheer making-words-sing talent. Which is not an idol comparison. The last Atwood I read was an intimate first person portrait of a somewhat foolish woman's life and loves and mistakes while playing point-of-view head games, and it struck me as beautiful and kind and cutting and true. Sweet Tooth is an intimate portrait of a somewhat foolish woman's life and loves and mistakes while playing point-of-view head games, and it struck me as unkind and, uh. I'll just come out and say it. Some women's literature studies grad student is going to get a hell of a thesis out of analyzing female sexuality as the subject of the male gaze in this book. Female everything, actually.

Right, glad I tore that bandaid off. I read a bunch of reviews when I was done, and a lot of them were really interested in talking about how McEwan was writing from a female point-of-view, and judging how well he did it. Men writing from the pov of women being a departure from the default male pov, apparently, and also writing from a female pov being like some moderately tricky dance routine. And I just kept gaping because -- you know what, I'm just going to spoiler cut the twist in this book, because the twist is that this is the female narrator's first person memoir, but surprise! It's actually her male lover writing from her point of view. Which is supposed to be romantic and unbearably intimate, but remember all that stuff up there about how she's portrayed as really not bright? And also there's the small detail of how no man seems to exist unless she's fucking him. Yup. Let that sink in for a minute. Like I said. Great feminist literature thesis unpicking the many, many layers of creepy/weird here, and the occasional bit of interesting.




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