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the complete review - fiction

Sweet Tooth

by
Ian McEwan

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : a bit pedestrian, but smooth, easy, intriguingly playful read

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Most find it very well written, but opinions are very mixed on how successful McEwan is

  From the Reviews:

• "It is a clever book (.....) But it is also curiously forgettable. What it lacks is not so much an animating spirit, as a heart. (...) The book chugs along this way until the end, when Mr McEwan delivers an unwieldy denouement and some unearned sadness. By then it is hard to feel much of anything for these heroes, who are all notions and no depth." - The Economist
  
  
• "Sweet Tooth offers enough atmosphere and forward motion to compensate for the story's slightness (and for an unnecessary twist ending that feels forced)." - Rob Brunner, Entertainment Weekly
  
  
• "The final turn in this thoroughly clever novel fills every hole that has appeared along the way, making reviewing it without giving away the twist rather tricky. (...) What pleased me most in Sweet Tooth was its description of the very British chasm between the arts and the sciences. (...) The novel’s structure is very impressive, with layer upon layer of writers and spies, past and present, and stories inside stories. One needs some sort of map to understand it all, which is only given out at the end of the book." - Lucy Kellaway, Financial Times
  
  
• "Depending on your tastes, you may find these recursive twists and turns delicious. It's certainly all fairly good fun to read, and the consolidation of the plot around the questions of how Serena is going to square her love with her treachery, and whether Haley's dystopian novel (based on McEwan's story "Two Fragments") is going to win the Austen prize, and if so whether his secret debt to MI5 is going to come out, is gripping in its own way -- even if that turns out to be more John Fowles than John le Carré." - James Lasdun, The Guardian
  
  
• "Sweet Tooth, as expected, is a well-crafted pleasure to read, its smooth prose and slippery intelligence sliding down like cream. Yet one feels at the end that it is the prelude for a film script, with all the actors already cast, and its final question a foregone conclusion." - Amanda Craig, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "The spy conceit of Sweet Tooth proves disappointingly thin. (...) The real subject of this novel is literature. Sweet Tooth is ultimately about the relationship between writers and readers: how frequently the writing of fiction is a form of infiltration and identity theft, how readers seek themselves in books, how much we know about an author from his creations." - Janelle Brown, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "It is knowing without being exactly postmodern. (...) Sweet Tooth is a triumph of the most negative possible kind, a novel that turns out to have been tiresome for a good reason" - Leo Robson, New Statesman
  
  
• "The result is a clever but annoying novel that lacks both the deeply felt emotion of this author’s dazzling 2001 masterpiece, Atonement, and the chilling exactitude of his 1998 Booker Prize-winning thriller, Amsterdam. (...) These aspects of Sweet Tooth keep the reader trucking on through the novel, but alas they’re insufficient compensation for the story’s self-conscious contrivance and foreseeable conclusion." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
  
  
• "(A)bout as entertaining as a very intelligent novel can be and vice versa. (...) McEwan, however, has his cake and eats it, until the last chapter keeping us unaware of the metafictional con under way. Instead of flaunting it, in 20th-­century spoilsport fashion, he uses his game to reinforce and deepen the pleasurable illusions of reality, thereby satisfying conservative readers like Serena as well as those like Tom with a taste for the literary fun house. (...) Sweet Tooth is extremely clever in both the British and American senses (smart as well as amusingly tricky) and his most cheerful book by far." - Kurt Andersen, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "This is a great big beautiful Russian doll of a novel, and its construction -- deft, tight, exhilaratingly immaculate -- is a huge part of its pleasure. There are stories within stories, ideas within ideas, even images within images (.....) (T)he novel's last few pages, with its delicious (and, you realise, blissfully earned) twist, moved me almost to tears. But you have to hang in there." - Julie Myerson, The Observer
  
  
• "Sweet Tooth is avowedly a story about stories. (...) (T)he real charge against Sweet Tooth is the same one you’d make against many of McEwan’s novels. It is that the cleverness of its construction makes it a clockwork rather than a living thing: events take place because the author needs them to, and the psychological plausibility of the characters is subordinate to the architecture of theme and plot rather than vice versa." - Sam Leith, The Spectator
  
  
• "Sweet Tooth is a fine and complex novel, the work of a master storyteller. It will absorb readers, of whom there will be very many. They should not go away thinking this is a true picture of the Security Service of 40 years ago." - John Scarlett, The Telegraph
  
  
• "Various pastiches involving McEwan’s first publisher Tom Maschler, mentor Ian Hamilton and friend Martin Amis duly satisfy. Forget the spy charade: this is ultimately a book about writing, wordplay and knowingness, from McEwan’s tart asides on literary prizes to Tom’s keenness on experimental novelists and Serena’s preference for more conventional structures." - Catherine Taylor, The Telegraph
  
  
• "McEwan’s addiction to narrative trickery has always made it difficult for critics to discuss his plots -- and so it is with Sweet Tooth, which balances precariously on the success of a final twist. (...) Sweet Tooth places too much faith in its own machinations but it is a distinctively, characteristically chilling work, nonetheless." - Jerome Boyd Maunsell, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "The whole of Sweet Tooth works this way, with the author constantly undercutting his story's gestures at seriousness while slipping in coy little flourishes that draw attention to his novelistic sleight-of-hand. (...) Ultimately, like his bloodless previous novel, Solar (2010), there is little point to Sweet Tooth beyond Mr. McEwan's low-level authorial deceptions." - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
  
  
• "Ian McEwan’s delicious new novel provides all the pleasures one has come to expect of him: pervasive intelligence, broad and deep knowledge, elegant prose, subtle wit and, by no means least, a singularly agreeable element of surprise." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Sweet Tooth is largely set in a troubled Britain in the early 1970s. The narrator presents herself as Serena Frome, the daughter of a bishop who has enough of a knack for maths to study it at Cambridge (but not quite so much as to get better than a third ...). What she really likes is reading, and that's something she continues to pursue. An affair with a much older man is a stepping stone to the British intelligence service MI5 where she lands an entry-level job. Career opportunities for women are still limited there at that time, and the pay isn't very good, but the secret job also holds some appeal.
       Eventually Serena is recruited to work on project 'Sweet Tooth', a program that channels funding to writers who seem to be sympathetic (to the anti-Soviet cause), as the CIA did with the magazine Encounter. They're eyeing up-and-coming novelists and avid reader Serena seems like just the girl to vet one they are considering -- and, if he's deemed suitable, to get him to take the money (without, of course, revealing where it's from or why he really is getting it).
       The author is Tom Haley, and though he's only written a few short works of fiction, as well as some essays, she's very impressed by what she reads. Haley, too, impresses her; as she puts it later:

I'd fallen for the stories and then the man.

I was a born empiricist. I believed that writers were paid to pretend, and where appropriate should make use of the real world, the one we all shared, to give plausibility to whatever they had made up. So, no tricksy haggling over the limits of their art, no showing disloyalty to the reader by appearing to cross and recross in disguise the borders of the imaginary. No room inthe books I liked for the double agent. That year I had tried and discarded the authors that sophisticated friends in Cambridge had pressed on me -- Borges and Barth, Pynchon and Cortázar and Gaddis.

My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British Security Service

- M.A.Orthofer, 7 May 2013

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Links:

• Vintage publicity page
• Anchor publicity page
• Einaudi publicity page

• About.com
• The Age
• The American Conservative
• The Atlantic
• B & N Review
• Belle of the Literati
• Boston Globe
• Chalk the Sun
• Chamber Four
• city of tongues
• Cleo's Literary Reviews
• Duke Chronicle
• Entertainment Weekly
• Evening Standard
• full stop
• The Gazette
• The Globe and Mail
• The Guardian
• Guernica
• The Hairy Dog Review
• Happy Antipodean
• The Harvard Crimson
• Highbrow Magazine
• Historical Novel Society
• Independent on Sunday
• KevinfromCanada
• lazycoffees
• Los Angeles Review of Books
• The Los Angeles Times
• Metro
• Middlebrow Magazine
• The Millions
• My Cup and Chaucer
• National Post
• New York Journal of Books
• Novel Insights
• npr
• The Observer
• The Onion
• Pajiba
• The Phoenix
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
• policymic
• Publishers Weekly
• The Rumpus
• Savidge Reads
• S.Krishna's Books
• Slate
• The Story's Story
• Sydney Morning Herald
• Tzer Island
• USA Today
• Wales Arts Review
• The Washington Post

• The Official Website of Ian McEwan
• Ian McEwan at Literature Matters
• Ian McEwan at The Guardian

• Amsterdam
• Atonement
• The Children Act
• Machines Like Me
• On Chesil Beach
• Saturday
• Solar

• See the index of Contemporary British fiction at the complete review

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About the Author:

       British author Ian McEwan is the author of many fine novels. He won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam in 1998.

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© 2013-2021 the complete review

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