Sweet Tooth

I’d never read anything by Ian McEwan before, but if Sweet Tooth is any indication of his typical writing style and thought process, count me in. It was really a fantastic, clever read: both entertaining and thought provoking (one of my favorite pairs).

First, he sucked me in by creating a great main character. Serena is young, beautiful, just getting out of college and experiencing some of those universal twenty-something traits: navigating the territory of a first serious relationship; the ambivalence of choosing your first “grown-up” job; knowing where to find some structure after the rug of college has been pulled from under you and the great disappointment you feel in the discovery of how people really are. I so appreciated that Serena wasn’t a trivial character. She doesn’t care about surrounding herself with people constantly or have even have a penchant for attention. That was refreshing. Instead, she’s logical. She encounters her emotions and can (largely) see them for what they are rather than getting swept up in them, though the unspiraling of that is a driving force in the conflict and resolution.

That she possessed mundane, relatable traits while working for the Secret Service and harboring a love for literature and diplomatic sensibilities was the magic combination for me.

Enjoyably, McEwan gave the reader a few chances to see what was coming next, but definitely had the power of a surprising twist or two.

Here are some of my favorite snippets.

“I owned one suitcase of clothes, fewer than fifty books, some childhood things in my bedroom at home. I had a lover who adored me and cooked for me. I had one obligation, a job interview–weeks away. I was free. So what was I doing, applying to the Security Service to help maintain this ailing state, this sick man of Europe? Nothing, I was doing nothing. I didn’t know. A chance had come my way and I was taking it. Tony wanted it so I wanted it and I had little else going on. So why not?”

~

“What a pleasure it was to arrive at seven on a Friday at the end of an arduous week and walk up the hill under the streetlight, smelling the sea and feeling that Brighton was as remote from London as Nice or Naples, knowing that Tom would have a bottle of white wine in the miniature fridge and wineglasses ready on the kitchen table. Our weekends were simple. We…read, walked on the seafront and we ate in restaurants. And Tom wrote.”

~

“Just then, I thought I’d never seen a man more beautiful. I forgave him his tailored pirate’s shirt. Love doesn’t grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wide leaps, and this was one of those…(only) far more powerful. I was tumbling through dimensionless space, even as I sat smiling demurely in a Brighton fish restaurant.”

~

“I couldn’t bear to look at him. I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore…it’s in the stars! What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?

~

“The young naval commander who spotted the episode would one day be a famous novelist himself. He was Ian Fleming… Who says poetry makes nothing happen? Mincemeat succeeded because invention, the imagination, drove the intelligence.”