Kristen Arnett’s With Teeth is a novel that you will remember, though it may take some effort to get into the story. At first, you think what’s going on here? But then you get the hang of it, and you start to enjoy it. Then afterwards, you think, wow, that was great. 

The prose is direct and simple. Sentences are short. There are not many characters to keep track of. Sammie and Monika are a couple. They have a young son, Samson. Samson can be a difficult kid, demanding and uncooperative. But then Sammie thinks that all kids are aliens. She is the one who looks after Samson most of the time, while Monika goes out to work. They live in Florida. The novel follows them over several years, to when Samson is in high school.

Sammie doesn’t seem to like her life much, and though she loves her wife and son, she often doesn’t like them much either. Occasionally in the text there are interruptions of the main flow, giving the perspectives of some incidental figure just encountered. Most think that Sammie has problems.

Sometimes Sammie’s behavior is extreme. Sometimes she is a bad parent. She can drink too much. That’s probably what makes the story so satisfying and disconcerting. Sammie messes up a lot, but life goes on. Sometimes it seems that Samson is seriously messed up, but he gets by. He probably won’t become a serial killer. He becomes good at swimming.

With Teeth captures a familiar sense of the strangeness of everyday life. It might be classified as a “lesbian novel” since it features lesbians, lesbian bars, lesbian dating apps, and even a little lesbian sex, it’s certainly easy to identify with Sammie’s discomfort with the world and to sympathize with her flaws. The book has a gentle undercurrent of dark humor and occasionally very funny moments, so that helps it not be all too depressing. 

Christian Perring is editor of Metapsychology Online.

Categories: Fiction

Keywords: fiction, lesbian