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3.34 AVERAGE
3.34 AVERAGE
The tale of Serena Frome, how she got along at university and afterward, the great enterprise in which she was surprised to find herself undertaking, the ending in which all that was important is validated, this is the surface of Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth.
But what the novel is also about is the love of books, of writing, of connecting. In a meta layer that honors literature lover and larger-than-life McEwan friend Christopher Hitchens, to whom the book is dedicated, Sweet Tooth is a homage to a perhaps more innocent belief that literature matters. It may not literally save a life, as it did in McEwan's Saturday, but literature sure does make life worth savoring.
Specifically, the plot concerns young Serena's coming of age. She has spent her life doing what others have expected -- majoring in maths at Cambridge when she would rather have studied literature at a less distinguished university up north, then falling under the influence of an older professor, getting a job for a government agency when she least expected it and then being assigned to take a major role in an espionage project -- when all she really wanted to do was inhale books.
My needs were simple. I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much of they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say "Marry me" by the end. Novels without female characters were a lifeles desert. ... Nor was I impressed by reputations. I read anything I saw lying around. Pulp fiction, great literature and everything in between -- I gave them all the same rough treatment.
Some reviewers have used this quote as an indictment of the novel, as being a comment of McEwan thinking women are stupid and silly. It didn't strike me that way and I still don't see it. Perhaps it's because I'm a book omnivore and not a genre snob. I don't insist on a happy ending, as the young Serena does, but I remember those days when I was thrilled about the way Jane Eyre ended and surprised at the turns Vanity Fair and Middlemarch took. Just because life doesn't often have a happy ending doesn't mean a reader can't want her book to end well on occasion. Sometimes, a happy ending fits.
In the same way she reads books in a breezy, suck 'em up and move on manner, and goes along with what's presented to her for an academic route and on the job, her attitude about relationships with men is to indulge herself with whoever is in front of her. In both her reading life and in her love life, however, there is the unexpected one who changes her outlook and, at length, her destiny.
Just as she seriously falls for the work of a serious writer (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and she falls after reading his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) who turns her from being a breezy columnist on books with a growing following into a harsh, tormented diarist people are not interested in reading, Serena falls for the young writer who she chooses for the espionage program she is assigned to. Sweet Tooth is the name of the operation, but it's also the way she consumes books and each new love affair. She is in love with love and, as Louisa May Alcott says, is too fond of books.
Sweet Tooth was generally not well-received by the critics. Perhaps, because Serena wrotes from the viewpoint of looking back at her early years, and because of the ending, this novel is being compared to Atonement and found wanting. I also get the sense that critics haven't approved of McEwan at least since Saturday, which I liked despite not rooting with a whole heart for the protagonist, and a climax that defied my ability to suspend disbelief. McEwan's heart was still in the right place.
The same can be said for Sweet Tooth. For all of Serena's apparent blase outlook and lack of thinking before she leaps, Serena's story, and her ultimate decision, show that love and literature are worthwhile choices for living a full life.
But what the novel is also about is the love of books, of writing, of connecting. In a meta layer that honors literature lover and larger-than-life McEwan friend Christopher Hitchens, to whom the book is dedicated, Sweet Tooth is a homage to a perhaps more innocent belief that literature matters. It may not literally save a life, as it did in McEwan's Saturday, but literature sure does make life worth savoring.
Specifically, the plot concerns young Serena's coming of age. She has spent her life doing what others have expected -- majoring in maths at Cambridge when she would rather have studied literature at a less distinguished university up north, then falling under the influence of an older professor, getting a job for a government agency when she least expected it and then being assigned to take a major role in an espionage project -- when all she really wanted to do was inhale books.
My needs were simple. I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much of they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say "Marry me" by the end. Novels without female characters were a lifeles desert. ... Nor was I impressed by reputations. I read anything I saw lying around. Pulp fiction, great literature and everything in between -- I gave them all the same rough treatment.
Some reviewers have used this quote as an indictment of the novel, as being a comment of McEwan thinking women are stupid and silly. It didn't strike me that way and I still don't see it. Perhaps it's because I'm a book omnivore and not a genre snob. I don't insist on a happy ending, as the young Serena does, but I remember those days when I was thrilled about the way Jane Eyre ended and surprised at the turns Vanity Fair and Middlemarch took. Just because life doesn't often have a happy ending doesn't mean a reader can't want her book to end well on occasion. Sometimes, a happy ending fits.
In the same way she reads books in a breezy, suck 'em up and move on manner, and goes along with what's presented to her for an academic route and on the job, her attitude about relationships with men is to indulge herself with whoever is in front of her. In both her reading life and in her love life, however, there is the unexpected one who changes her outlook and, at length, her destiny.
Just as she seriously falls for the work of a serious writer (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and she falls after reading his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) who turns her from being a breezy columnist on books with a growing following into a harsh, tormented diarist people are not interested in reading, Serena falls for the young writer who she chooses for the espionage program she is assigned to. Sweet Tooth is the name of the operation, but it's also the way she consumes books and each new love affair. She is in love with love and, as Louisa May Alcott says, is too fond of books.
Sweet Tooth was generally not well-received by the critics. Perhaps, because Serena wrotes from the viewpoint of looking back at her early years, and because of the ending, this novel is being compared to Atonement and found wanting. I also get the sense that critics haven't approved of McEwan at least since Saturday, which I liked despite not rooting with a whole heart for the protagonist, and a climax that defied my ability to suspend disbelief. McEwan's heart was still in the right place.
The same can be said for Sweet Tooth. For all of Serena's apparent blase outlook and lack of thinking before she leaps, Serena's story, and her ultimate decision, show that love and literature are worthwhile choices for living a full life.
This is on multiple "best of 2012" lists. I did not love it as much as most people it would seem. I thought it dragged for long sections and segments of the main plot line to be unsatisfying, but ultimately found it worthwhile for the writing and the spot-on observations of human nature and young adulthood.
Devastatingly boring conclusion to the story that reads like the manifest in 1984. Weird tangents into the stories that one of the characters writes. Glad my book club members warned me that it wasn't that good so I could skip over large sections of it.
Though advertised as a racy espionage thriller, Sweet Tooth, in standard McEwan fashion, runs far deeper than any single genre can define. Real life love is, like any emotion found in living beings, a complicated, multilayered and hard to describe feeling; but McEwan somehow perfectly grasps the meaning of this emotion and captures it with pen and paper in this book, through a fictional story so meticulously planned and rivetingly executed that it no longer feels fictional - reading Sweet Tooth transcends the mere recognition and understanding of text on a page, surpassing the importance of real life in the eye of an engrossed reader, thus achieving the ultimate goal of fiction itself: complete and utter escapism.
I've enjoyed it. A little slow and dry at times but the ending makes sense of everything. Do not expect a spy story.
Not my favorite of his. It did encourage me to think about my fiction addiction, but I felt that a few of the plot twists were readily apparent from early on.
Serena Frome's is the main character who lives in the year 1972 during the cold war.
Serena becomes involved in a covert program to combat communism. She need to spy on the young Tom Haley who is a novel writer.
Things start to get complicated when she fell in love with Tom. With the mission in her mind she start to worry that Tom would find out.
When Tom ask her to marry him she ends up in a emotional rollercoaster. Things change when Tom find out about the mission. That's the part where the story gets really interesting. And then i faced this open ending wich is such a deal breaker for me. Because i would have loved to know how the story would have ended.
Serena becomes involved in a covert program to combat communism. She need to spy on the young Tom Haley who is a novel writer.
Things start to get complicated when she fell in love with Tom. With the mission in her mind she start to worry that Tom would find out.
When Tom ask her to marry him she ends up in a emotional rollercoaster. Things change when Tom find out about the mission. That's the part where the story gets really interesting. And then i faced this open ending wich is such a deal breaker for me. Because i would have loved to know how the story would have ended.
I spent most of this book frustrated at the lead female character's simplicity. In an era when women were struggling to overcome the wide-held belief (which is plainly stated by male characters) that women would be a detriment to the workforce because they are too emotional, I wanted to strangle a character who despite indicating a desire to advance in MI5, ends up promptly falling in love with both a co-worker then an asset. She lets her feelings indeed get in the way of work, and for someone who works for MI5, seems to have little interest in or respect for the goals of the operation she's working on. It's more a love story twice over than a covert operations novel with any kind of intrigue, and I found myself relatively uninterested in Serena's romances as she went on and on about the details of her days with Canning, then Haley. The most interesting part develops toward the end of the book when details emerge publicly about Haley being funded by MI5. And ultimately, the twist at the end of the novel serves to imbue the whole tale with more complexity and intrigue than the hundreds of pages that preceded it. But a twist at the end, though interesting and more or less satisfying, doesn't make the novel great as a whole.
adventurous
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I love it when a story surprises me in the best of ways. I couldn't put this book down; the ending blindsided me in the best way possible.