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nick_jenkins 's review for:
Sweet Tooth
by Ian McEwan
A very satisfying "five-finger exercise" (as one character calls a bit of writing in the novel), but it lacks the urgency and edginess that mark McEwan's best fiction. The reasons for this are themselves quite fascinating, but nonetheless disappointing.
It is probably quite difficult at this point to make the spy games of the late Cold War seem vital and interesting in large part because in popular (and often scholarly) imagination the 1970s, especially the early 1970s, remains held in a sort of enervated pause, swathed in drably nostalgic indifference. That is the general environment, and the more specific espionage angle reinforces it strongly. There is an explicit argument in the novel (it also is made in the recent adaptation of Tinker, Tailor) that the stakes of the Cold War have, by 1972/1973 (the setting of the novel) been removed, and what is left is pure bureaucratic inertia. McEwan tries to leaven this stagnation with little draughts of the Troubles, but one character near the end (not giving anything away, though) remarks quite aptly: "He said I had to understand, any institution, any organization eventually becomes a dominion, self-contained, competitive, driven by its own logic and bent on survival and on extending its territory. It was as inexorable and blind as a chemical process."
This understanding of bureaucracy cannot, I believe, make for good fiction, at least not if the author's brief is to draw out the conclusions of such a view. Presenting merely the listless grappling of forces already in existence delivers no sense of depth or complexity, much less immediacy or novelty, things necessary for a truly compelling novel. McEwan gestures toward new forces--feminism, gay life and culture, terrorism--but these are ornaments rather than structural elements in the story, and their interjection makes little difference, ultimately, to the novel's primary concern, which is narrative and the craft of fiction.
In many ways this is a forthrightly reactionary novel, convinced that it can both reject the metafictional flourishes of the 1970s heyday of the postmodern novel (named in its pages are Gaddis, García Marquéz, Pynchon, Ballard, and Barth) yet still outbid them in cleverness and conceit (in both the sense of a literary device and of a state of excessive self-regard). It slots neatly in next to many of the products of what Nick Dames referred to as the "Theory Generation" (http://nplusonemag.com/the-theory-generation), writers who find a good portion of their métier in the ambivalent space between acknowledging that Theory forever changed the novel and wishing to let that ineluctable knowledge lapse from time to time.
As I said, if a novel is going to be rather languid and unenthusiastic, it is best to be so for interesting reasons, and drawing those out of this novel, while not much of a challenge, is quite enjoyable on its own.
It is probably quite difficult at this point to make the spy games of the late Cold War seem vital and interesting in large part because in popular (and often scholarly) imagination the 1970s, especially the early 1970s, remains held in a sort of enervated pause, swathed in drably nostalgic indifference. That is the general environment, and the more specific espionage angle reinforces it strongly. There is an explicit argument in the novel (it also is made in the recent adaptation of Tinker, Tailor) that the stakes of the Cold War have, by 1972/1973 (the setting of the novel) been removed, and what is left is pure bureaucratic inertia. McEwan tries to leaven this stagnation with little draughts of the Troubles, but one character near the end (not giving anything away, though) remarks quite aptly: "He said I had to understand, any institution, any organization eventually becomes a dominion, self-contained, competitive, driven by its own logic and bent on survival and on extending its territory. It was as inexorable and blind as a chemical process."
This understanding of bureaucracy cannot, I believe, make for good fiction, at least not if the author's brief is to draw out the conclusions of such a view. Presenting merely the listless grappling of forces already in existence delivers no sense of depth or complexity, much less immediacy or novelty, things necessary for a truly compelling novel. McEwan gestures toward new forces--feminism, gay life and culture, terrorism--but these are ornaments rather than structural elements in the story, and their interjection makes little difference, ultimately, to the novel's primary concern, which is narrative and the craft of fiction.
In many ways this is a forthrightly reactionary novel, convinced that it can both reject the metafictional flourishes of the 1970s heyday of the postmodern novel (named in its pages are Gaddis, García Marquéz, Pynchon, Ballard, and Barth) yet still outbid them in cleverness and conceit (in both the sense of a literary device and of a state of excessive self-regard). It slots neatly in next to many of the products of what Nick Dames referred to as the "Theory Generation" (http://nplusonemag.com/the-theory-generation), writers who find a good portion of their métier in the ambivalent space between acknowledging that Theory forever changed the novel and wishing to let that ineluctable knowledge lapse from time to time.
As I said, if a novel is going to be rather languid and unenthusiastic, it is best to be so for interesting reasons, and drawing those out of this novel, while not much of a challenge, is quite enjoyable on its own.