Book Review: Sweet Tooth was my first book by Ian McEwan; I'm not sure we had the best introduction. The book was written well enough, tho some stretches took patience to keep reading. I felt there were parts where there wasn't a lot going on, but I was reading to see when something else interesting was going to come along, and it usually did. I've heard such good things about the author that I felt I had to keep reading. McEwan is a good writer and intelligent, but here he seemed too clever by half. There are tricks and cleverness in Sweet Tooth, but does that make a good book? Gillian Flynn made a book out of it, but I'm not sure if that's who McEwan is patterning himself after. In genre fiction, especially short fiction, the surprise ending seems to be accepted: the mystery novel where the murderer turns out to be the narrator, the sci-fi story where the wily enemy is AI created by a long vanished civilization. But more serious literature doesn't usually rely on such techniques. Maybe McEwan just wanted to write a spy novel beach read, I don't know. But I do know I want to read more by McEwan, Atonement and some of his early stories in particular, and maybe this just wasn't the right time for me to read Sweet Tooth. I may do a re-read, and I'll keep thinking about my opinion on surprise endings as a literary device (how is this a book meant to last? once knowing the surprise, why ever read it again?). I'm sure there's a place for such stories, just not sure where that place is. [3 Stars]
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