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<\/a>Serena Frome has been playing out of her league all her life.<\/p>\nThe mostly overlooked daughter of an Anglican bishop, she attends Cambridge University, where she\u2019s a middling student in \u201cthe maths\u201d and the target of derision by more talented male classmates.<\/p>\n
She accepts work in the British Security Services, where few females rise above secretarial positions and where her male superiors outmaneuver her.<\/p>\n
But it is in love that Serena, lead character in Ian McEwan\u2019s 2012 thriller, is most obviously outplayed. Her first lover is a gay student who uses her to hide his homosexuality. That\u2019s something one must do in early 1970s England.<\/p>\n
Her next is a Cambridge professor, 33 years her senior, who enjoys his dalliance and dumps her at a highway rest stop. Her third is the true premier leaguer, however, feasting on her minor league talent.<\/p>\n
Thomas Haley is a rising author and literature professor at a second-tier British university. Frome\u2019s superiors assign her to enlist him in an MI 5-sponsored program through which he\u2019ll receive a regular stipend to write whatever fiction he wants. MI 5 considers Haley a supporter of British ideals, a young cultural figure who\u2019ll be a good tool in the Cold War\u2019s clash of ideas.<\/p>\n
After Serena reads several of Haley\u2019s graphically sexual short stories, she fantasizes. Once she meets him \u2013 he\u2019s handsome, of course \u2013 she lands in his bed, something that\u2019s clearly a conflict of interest for a spy, which, technically, she is at this point.<\/p>\n
Poor Serena. She just wants a good job, a good lover and a chance to read. She loves literature and would have been an English major but for her mother\u2019s insistence that she use her math talents to enter a male-dominated field, helping liberate all women.<\/p>\n
Serena becomes entangled in the intrigues of MI 5, the jealousies of co-workers, the vindictiveness of a rejected suitor and the manipulations of those much craftier than she.<\/p>\n
Sweet Tooth<\/em> is set amid the social and political turmoil of early 1970s London and is a fictional account of government attempts to infiltrate the intellectual community for Cold War purposes. It\u2019s wonderfully written; no one would expect anything less from McEwan. But one gets the sense that it could have just as easily been a long short story as a novel. One, two, maybe three accounts of weekends in bed might have been enough to get across the concept that Serena and Thomas liked sex.<\/p>\n And just about the time the reader wonders where the hell this story is going, McEwan throws in a twist in the last chapter that turns the whole damned thing on its head. Pretty clever.<\/p>\n That one word sums up the whole novel: clever. All of these men were more clever than Serena, and McEwan is more clever than his readers, at least this reader.<\/p>\n