The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Sharp Teeth of Love by Doris Betts
Barbara Bennett

Doris Betts. The Sharp Teeth of Love. Knopf, 1997. 336 pp. $24.00.

One might say that Doris Betts’s The Sharp Teeth of Love shows what can happen to a couple on a cross-country trip if they don’t have a car radio that works. On the way from Chapel Hill to her wedding in Nevada, illustrator Luna Stone changes her mind, runs away from her too-beautiful professor fiancé, and hides out in the Sierra Nevadas to take a “vacation from love.” While camping and thinking, Luna encounters a strange cast of characters who accompany her through her crisis: a twelve-year-old boy on the run from those who have sold him into the world of child pornography, a deaf preacher from Wisconsin who reads Kafka because he likes the picture on the front of the book, and the ghost of Tamsen Donner, who had stayed with her dying husband rather than try to escape, had died, and was eaten as a member of the famous Donner Party of 1846.
In the mountains Luna reflects on her earlier life in North Carolina, dominated by a military father who feared his daughter might get as “fat as butter.” Luna, true to her name, has a nervous breakdown, becomes anorexic, and stops speaking. After her tentative recovery, she begins sketching plants and human organs for pay—because they make “nature hold still”—and meets her future fiancé, a graduate student who eats “her time and her strength” and “her flesh.”
Not since her novel Heading West (1981) has Betts created such endearing and intriguing characters, with humor—crackling at unexpected moments—so perfectly balanced with tragedy. Luna is a sort of modern-day version of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” and the novel is about starving people—physically and emotionally—and the extremes they go to in order to feed and nourish their bodies and souls, as well as the silence people adopt when they are malnourished by life. As a character in search of herself, Luna learns in the wide open spaces of the West what she could not have learned in the lush but stifling South about feeding herself, survival, and the kind of sacrifices that real love demands. [Barbara Bennett]


Interview with Founder Board of Directors Funders Submission Guidelines Dalkey Archive Full Catalog Current and Forthcoming Titles Recent Titles Review of Contemporary Fiction Special Library Offer Special Backlist Sale Stores & Wholesalers Academics Libraries Reviewers Context Casebooks Author Interviews Links Dalkey Archive News Events Newsletter

The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Sharp Teeth of Love by Doris Betts Barbara Bennett Doris Betts. The Sharp Teeth of Love. Knopf, 1997. 336 pp. $24.00. One might say that Doris Betts’s The Sharp Teeth of Love shows what can happen to a couple on a cross-country trip if they don’t have a car radio that works. On the way from Chapel Hill to her wedding in Nevada, illustrator Luna Stone changes her mind, runs away from her too-beautiful professor fiancé, and hides out in the Sierra Nevadas to take a “vacation from love.” While camping and thinking, Luna encounters a strange cast of characters who accompany her through her crisis: a twelve-year-old boy on the run from those who have sold him into the world of child pornography, a deaf preacher from Wisconsin who reads Kafka because he likes the picture on the front of the book, and the ghost of Tamsen Donner, who had stayed with her dying husband rather than try to escape, had died, and was eaten as a member of the famous Donner Party of 1846. In the mountains Luna reflects on her earlier life in North Carolina, dominated by a military father who feared his daughter might get as “fat as butter.” Luna, true to her name, has a nervous breakdown, becomes anorexic, and stops speaking. After her tentative recovery, she begins sketching plants and human organs for pay—because they make “nature hold still”—and meets her future fiancé, a graduate student who eats “her time and her strength” and “her flesh.” Not since her novel Heading West (1981) has Betts created such endearing and intriguing characters, with humor—crackling at unexpected moments—so perfectly balanced with tragedy. Luna is a sort of modern-day version of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” and the novel is about starving people—physically and emotionally—and the extremes they go to in order to feed and nourish their bodies and souls, as well as the silence people adopt when they are malnourished by life. As a character in search of herself, Luna learns in the wide open spaces of the West what she could not have learned in the lush but stifling South about feeding herself, survival, and the kind of sacrifices that real love demands. [Barbara Bennett]

Search the full text of our books: