Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth
vs
Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed
Judge: Mary Drew
Please note that the postings of some of these essays is out of order.
Judging these two books has been an intriguing experience, filled with anticipation, disappointment, U-turns, and finally, great satisfaction with both.
Last December I borrowed Sweet Tooth from the library. I found it plodding and pedestrian and sent it back after I had read 135 out of 300 pages (I keep notes.) This was mildly surprising because I really like Ian McEwan's later novels (his earlier books strike me as unripe, he's trying too hard.)
So when I was faced with comparing the book to The Accursed I borrowed it again but began first to read Joyce Carol Oates. And what a delight that turned out to be. I'm not particularly a fan, having read only two or possibly three of her many previous works. But this book is just the sort of thing I enjoy. It is, at least at first, a straightforward story, set in Princeton, NJ, the town and the college, in 1905-1906.The young Woodrow Wilson is the president of the college and he is in a battle to the death with a senior dean over . . . well, over anything and everything Wilson wants to do. A remarkably humorless and self-absorbed man, he is putty in the hands of the older man, who enjoys playing with him and balking his every move.
The story is about the relationships between the faculty, the old families in town, and a couple of well-known figures (Jack London, Sinclair Lewis) who live nearby or visit. The narrative voice switches among various characters (diaries and letters) and then reverts back to the self-satisfied, quirky amateur historian who is purportedly writing the story. A mysterious stranger appears one day and not long after he runs off with the bride immediately after a big society wedding. Why did she go? Who was the stranger? Are the purported sightings of her in later months valid or somebody's imagination?
There's a hint that the stranger may be the devil, but how do you go about determining the validity of a theory like that?
So I was perking along with this book, enjoying the story, the characters, the setting, the quirks of plot, the atmosphere. But it's 600 pages long. So I decided to put it aside and get to work, and it did look like it was going to be work, on Sweet Tooth.
The thing about Sweet Tooth is that it's told in the first person by a young woman who works for MI5 in the early 1970s. She lies for a living. She's a spy. Sort of. She isn't too bright, she got a third in mathematics from Cambridge and although I don't understand the British educational system I do understand that a third cannot be good. The folks at MI5, the heirs of Ian Fleming and John Masterman and the other men who devised Operation Mincemeat, creating The Man Who Never Was, one of the most creative and successful espionage tricks since the Trojan Horse, have come up with a pedestrian scheme to fund writers they have identified as being anti-Communist, as leaning rightward politically. The money is provided through a foundation at a third or fourth level from MI5 and should be impossible for the writers or the press to trace back.
Our heroine is assigned a novelist (who, by the way, bears a remarkable resemblance to Ian McEwan) to whom she offers the money and who accepts. This is a woman who loves men and who hops from one bed to another, inevitably hopping into the bed of the novelist whom she is "handling" or "controlling" as they say in MI5. This is dangerous and becomes more so as her novelist becomes increasingly sought after by big-name publishers and wins a major prize much like (only better and older than) the Booker.
But things don't feel quite right. The reader has some questions about what's happening and how sincere some of the characters are and what is really going on between them. Part of the reason I gave up on the book the first time around was because I dislike unreliable narrators. I don't like to work that hard to figure out what I'm reading.
But it turns out I stopped reading too soon. Half way through the book, but still, it was too soon, because around the middle it starts to get increasingly complicated and the reader's suspicions grow until they cannot be ignored. Somewhere around page 200 is the tipping point. After that I was reading faster and was more engrossed, the book had become a page-turner. I had to know what was going on, what would happen next, what was I really reading?
I didn't figure all that out until about 20 pages from the end when it was handed to me on a platter. Why didn't I see this coming? I knew something strange was going on with this story and Ian McEwan has a knack for this sort of gotcha (think of the end of Atonement) so I should have been prepared.
When it was time to go back to The Accursed the bubble had burst and I found it dragged just a bit. I did enjoy watching the author shred Woodrow Wilson (a well-deserved shredding in my opinion), I was eager to see how the story would turn out, and it was quite satisfying in the end. But the book couldn't compare with Sweet Tooth, which is why I picked that book as the winner of Day Seven of the Buff Orpington Tournament.
