Most big-time novelists sooner or later write a novel or two about books and writers, and this is not McEwan’s first iteration. Its true subject is not espionage but, as in Atonement, the porous boundaries between the imaginary and the real — and, as in Atonement, he’s got a large metafictional trick up his sleeve. In other words, if I may indulge in my own meta-nonfictional swerve, Sweet Tooth is ‘a novel about the powerful influence literature can exert on life’ … 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.
In Ian McEwan’s tricky and captivating new novel Sweet Tooth, he takes as his complex subject the male writer entering a woman’s consciousness (or it might be more accurate in this case to say breaking and entering a woman’s consciousness) … Even the sensitive, artistically attuned, intellectually sophisticated male writer sees a woman in a very different way than she would see herself. The gap McEwan investigates is enormous and fascinating, and if we truly want to understand sexual politics, we need to read, instead of ironic blogs and Caitlin Moran and faux sociology, more novels like this one … McEwan’s meta-fictional trick, his pulling the rug out from under the reader is interesting, because it requires her to reread, rethink, retread the novel.
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 … If this is indeed Serena’s story, the telling of it in time becomes part of the mystery, yet another manifestation of McEwan’s fascination with the ownership of narrative and the complicated relationship between imagination and intelligence. Intelligence, that is, in the sense of espionage, information-gathering, dissembling and false clues … We are instructed, right toward the end, about the difference between intelligence and invention and given a superb lesson in how to distinguish between the two.
We start off knowing how Serena’s story will end. The mystery, it would appear, has to do only with the details of her mission, the identity of her lover, and the nature of her undoing … About halfway through readers may begin to suspect what the story’s concluding twist might be, and when we reach the end, we realize that the puzzle pieces Mr. McEwan has hand carved don’t quite come together with the sort of authoritative click that might have made for a fully satisfying novel … Mr. McEwan seems to want to make the reader think about the lines between life and art, and the similarities between spying and writing. He also seems to want to make us reconsider the assumptions we make when we read a work of fiction.
McEwan deploys his great gifts of storytelling to draw readers into an intricate plot about Serena's career during the 1970s, working as a low-level operative for MI5, the British internal intelligence service. Then, by novel's end, McEwan ridicules us readers for ever believing in Serena and the fictional world he's blown breath into … There's a degree of nastiness here — particularly in that genderized disdain for female readers as well as in McEwan's cool dismissal of the products of his own imagination. Postmodernist writing can have humor and heart, but, in Sweet Tooth, McEwan's postmodernist narrative ‘tricks’ simply serve as weapons of mass destruction. The novel is exposed as little more than a mental game, and Serena, whom we've grown attached to, is brutally silenced.
Sweet Tooth, is a story of spying and of reading; two activities that blur together for us as we lose ourselves in the book. For what is reading fiction, really, but spying — gazing at a life that isn't ours; observing characters moving through their plots, rarely knowing that they're being watched? … There's an irresistible thread running through Sweet Tooth: that of reading as a compulsive urge (to satisfy a sweet tooth, you might say), and of writing as a revelation of someone's true — or invented — self … As Serena reads Tom and we read McEwan, taking pleasure in each layer, Sweet Tooth moves elegantly toward its inevitable conclusion: Trust — in life, and in narrative fiction — is hard-earned, and surprisingly elusive.
Anyone who has seen the recent film version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy will have the right images to draw on – dim lighting, mustard-colored jackets, rooms full of smoke – as McEwan's heroine, Serena Frome, takes a lowly post in MI5's shabby offices shortly after graduating from Cambridge … Nor will anyone familiar with Atonement...be shocked by this novel's various narrative twists, which a reviewer would reveal at her peril. Suffice it to say that at the heart of Sweet Tooth, as of so much of McEwan's work, is an interest in the nature of identity, and of truth.
Predictably — what is more predictable in a spy story than the agent falls for her target? — Serena takes a fancy to the brilliant and single-minded Tom. If this were all McEwan wanted to accomplish, Sweet Tooth, with its off-the-rack plot and its idiosyncratic but lifeless characters, would be nothing more than a mediocre spy novel. Instead, it is a mediocre spy novel with a cumbersome thematic apparatus … McEwan is also fascinated with the parallels between spying and writing fiction. Serena spies on Tom, but Tom also spies on Serena by making her the subject of his fiction.
The spy conceit of Sweet Tooth proves disappointingly thin. McEwan makes a halfhearted attempt at '70s espionage intrigue — a truncated subplot about whether Canning was a Russian double agent, padded with some paranoia about surveillance teams called ‘The Watchers’ and a mysterious bloodstained mattress in a safe house — but the drama is much ado about nothing of great interest. 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 … What we learn at the end should make readers want to flip back through the book and re-read it with opened eyes; unfortunately, the experience of wading through Sweet Tooth the first time dispels much urge to read it again.
Sweet Tooth is not Mr McEwan’s finest book...It is a clever book—ostensibly about spying, yet really about writers and the alchemy of fiction. But it is also curiously forgettable. What it lacks is not so much an animating spirit, as a heart … [The] hedonistic affair is full of Chablis and long discussions about famous writers and publishers of the time (Martin Amis, Tom Maschler). 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.
Sweet Tooth is playful, comic, preposterous even. But it's impossible to ignore that its protagonist is a young and fairly gauche English person – female this time – failing miserably (though perhaps not so dangerously) in her job as a spy … 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 … Because this isn't really a novel about MI5 or the cold war or even – despite the rather obviously ladled-on research about Heath and Wilson and miners' strikes and the IRA – the 70s. This is a novel about writers and writing, about love and trust. But more than that – and perhaps most incisively of all – it's a novel about reading and readers.
It seems certain that the mission, one way or another, will be intricately bound up with the more significant conflicts of that discordant era. Given McEwan's ability to make riveting fiction out of English politics (not easy), it would be hard to imagine anyone better equipped to write such a story … One resists, slightly, the literary turn. Still, manipulation of the intelligentsia has a deep history on both sides of the iron curtain...but as Serena begins reading the writer's stories, summarising them at length in her own text, it begins to look, unexpectedly, as if the book's real subject is in fact going to be its own navel, or at least its own author.
Set in the early 1970s, the story involves the sly art of spycraft at the British internal intelligence division MI5. From the first page, however, it is readily apparent that covert operator Serena Frome is no James Bond … With its female narrator and the twisting plot, Sweet Tooth is most reminiscent of Mr. McEwan's earlier Atonement. Though I must admit that Atonement still ranks as my favorite McEwan work, this book has none of its smoky cloud of regret. Instead, this new offering is more upbeat, more sentimental and, dare I say it, a bit more sweet.
McEwan goes for laughs in this cold war spoof in which Serena Frome, one time math whiz, struggles through Cambridge and graduates in 1972 with an embarrassing third. For reasons never satisfactorily explained, a professor and former MI5 operative recruits her as a spy … Espionage fans won’t find much that’s credible, and fans of political farce might be surprised by a narrative less focused on lampooning MI5 than on mocking (mostly female) readers. Given the nonstop wisecracks, the book might be most satisfying if read as sheer camp. A twist confirms that the misogyny isn’t to be taken seriously, but Serena’s intellectual inferiority is a joke that takes too long to reach its punch line.
Both the title and the tone make this initially seem to be an uncharacteristically light and playful novel from McEwan … Britain’s foremost living novelist has written a book—often as drily funny as it is thoughtful—that somehow both subverts and fulfills every expectation its protagonist has for fiction.
