![]() ![]() Serena, an omnivorous and proudly indiscriminate reader, declares her literary tastes early in the novel. ![]() ") A description of one such encounter, narrated by Serena, features the line: "He turned out to be a tender and considerate lover, despite his unfortunate, sharply angled pubic bone" - an unexpected sequence of words the first time you encounter it, and a wholly unforgettable one when, for reasons that I can't reveal without giving away a twist, you encounter a variation of those words a second time.īut "Sweet Tooth," unlike "On Chesil Beach," is not mainly about sex - it's about spying and reading. ("I lost my virginity in my first term, several times over it seemed, the general style being so wordless and clumsy. . . His new novel, "Sweet Tooth," set in 1972, features multiple awkward first couplings between the main character, Serena Frome, and a series of lovers. ![]() The novel before that, "On Chesil Beach," set in 1962, builds to a tragic moment of fumbled copulation between two virgins that ends a marriage on its first night, recharting the lives of the main characters. His last novel, "Solar," boasted a cringe-making scene featuring a frostbitten phallus's unfortunate encounter with a zipper. Lately, the Booker Prize-winning novelist Ian McEwan seems to have developed a peculiar fascination with botched first couplings and penile misadventures. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |