With Teeth, Kristen Arnett's second novel (after her debut Mostly Dead Things), returns readers to central Florida for a frank, sometimes dark, often funny portrayal of queer parenthood and midlife as experienced by a lesbian mom with a faltering marriage and an unfathomable child.
Sammie turns her back for a moment, and her four-year-old son and namesake Samson happily walks off with a probable child abductor at a local park. She intervenes promptly, but his readiness to leave her for a stranger stays in her mind for years as she struggles with Samson's apathetic and occasionally cruel behavior. Whether he leaves a creepy doll in her bed, à la The Godfather, as a fourth grader, or gets in trouble at work for spitting in someone's drink as a teenager, she can count on him to have the "same indifferent look he always had" and to remain an enigma. Her charismatic, successful wife, Monika, provides financially but downplays Sammie's concerns about their son, and Sammie quietly resents doing the bulk of the domestic labor while "Monika got to be the dad-mom, the fun one...." As the years pass, Sammie faces the isolation of parenthood, the indignities of aging and the heartache of a failing marriage with her own awkward, often self-destructive, always totally understandable style.
Readers will cringe in sympathy as Sammie self-soothes using alcohol and other dubious means, often followed by public embarrassment. Arnett walks a fine line between humor and pathos, and With Teeth should resonate with any reader who has ever felt like a stranger in their own life. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads