Published in 2012, Ian McEwan’s twelfth novel, Sweet Tooth , set in London and Brighton in 1972-74, is, under the guise of a spy thriller and a love story, a self-reflexive narrative. McEwan himself terms Sweet Tooth a “muted and distorted autobiography” (Cooke), since aspects of his own education and early literary career have been revisited and assigned to one of the major characters, young novelist Tom Haley, resulting in “a weirdly refracted fictional autobiography” (Stossel). Foregrounding the artificiality inherent in the creative acts of producing and consuming literature, Sweet Tooth questions expectations of “naive realism” and insists that the author is a &l…
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Citation: Logotheti, Anastasia. "Sweet Tooth". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 October 2017 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=34688, accessed 25 November 2024.]
