“I was a novelist without a novel,” Tom reflects, “and now luck had tossed my way a tasty bone, the bare outline of a useful story.” He just hasn’t filled that outline in with the richest tints of humanity. Sweet Tooth, in contrast, seems all head and no heart its people (like, as it turns out, the narrative itself) are just petty and manipulative. Where is the equivalent in Sweet Tooth of the Dunkirk sequences? What here even approaches the wrenching pathos of Atonement‘s elegaic conclusion? The cruelty and devastation we see in Atonement are greater than anything in Sweet Tooth, the people in it at least as guilty of selfishness, greed, and betrayal - but they also love passionately. But I’d need some extrinsic motivation to do that (maybe the other reviews will provide it?) because Sweet Tooth never gripped me: it lacks the gutsiness that lies beneath Atonement‘s opening aestheticism and that comes out into the open during the war sections. Maybe if I reread Sweet Tooth, I’ll find the experience a similarly stirring literary treasure hunt. It’s true that I didn’t see until I did some careful rereading just how artful Atonement is (one of my favorite details is that Briony turns out to have made the changes recommended by Cyril Connolly at Horizon). The revelations of Sweet Tooth are actually not that different from the writerly twists in Atonement, but the payoffs seemed much slighter to me. Now that I’ve finally read Sweet Tooth, I’ll be looking up what other people have said about it.) I suppose that’s my own modified version of the audition screens. (In case you’re wondering why I didn’t know all about it from reviews, I typically avoid reviews of books I know I’m going to read until after I have a chance to read them for myself. Then when the long-anticipated game-changer arrived, it was so obvious that I realized that in one way or another I had already predicted it. By page 300, I was getting downright impatient for this revelatory moment, as on its own surface terms the book I was reading wasn’t giving me much of a thrill.
#Tad friend shirley hazzard full
Knowing Sweet Tooth was “an Ian McEwan” I read along in full expectation of a big twist, a surprise, a treat that would throw everything I thought I knew about the book into some new perspective, or draw together its elements into a shape I hadn’t seen before. When writers raise the bar, isn’t it only fair to test their subsequent efforts not just against the books they already outmatched but against their own previous personal best? Once an ice skater has included a quad, doesn’t every program without one seem just a tad safe, no matter how perfect the triple axels?Īnd I’d say “safe” is a good word for Sweet Tooth, along with “flat” and “smart” - and, again, only for McEwan would that last term not be entirely praise - smart is the least I expect of him. And yet I’m not sure that pristine anonymity is quite what we want.
If only books could be read “blind,” as orchestral auditions are sometimes done now - with the author’s identity concealed and so no preconceptions or biases to come between us and the words on the page. If Sweet Tooth were not by Ian McEwan (author, as is stressed on the cover of my edition, of Atonement - one of my very favorite recent novels) would I have been disappointed in it? How unfair, in a way, that the burden of great expectations should interfere with my appreciation of this well-crafted, elegantly told tale with its clever premise so smoothly executed.
0 kommentar(er)
