With Teeth, Kristen Arnett's second novel (after her Mostly Dead Things), returns to central Florida for a frank, sometimes dark, often funny portrayal of queer parenthood and midlife from a lesbian mom with a faltering marriage and an unfathomable child.
Sammie turns her back at a local park, and her four-year-old son, Samson, happily walks off with a probable child abductor. 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 (he leaves a creepy doll in her bed as a fourth grader, and gets in trouble at work for spitting in someone's drink as a teenager). Her charismatic, successful wife, Monika, provides financially but downplays Sammie's concerns about their son: "Monika got to be the dad-mom, the fun one...." As the years pass, Sammie faces the isolation of parenthood, aging and the heartache of a failing marriage with her own awkward, often self-destructive, always credible style.
Arnett's character-driven narrative focuses on Sammie's point of view, with occasional windows into those of minor characters. These glimpses show Sammie as she appears to others, usually in contrast to the mistaken assumptions she projects onto their reactions. Readers will cringe in sympathy as Sammie self-soothes using alcohol and other means, often followed by public embarrassment. Arnett walks a fine line between humor and pathos, sensitively conveying Sammie's loss of a social circle, her fear that others will judge a lesbian couple unfit to parent a boy, and her abdication of self. Complicated, fearless and confidently messy, With Teeth--named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post--should resonate with any reader who has ever felt like a stranger in their own life. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads