The mouth is a weird place. Not quite inside and not quite out, not skin and not organ, but something in between: dark, wet, admitting access to an interior most people would rather not contemplate--where cancer starts, where the heart is broken, where the soul might just fail to turn up.
I encouraged my patients to floss.
...is the beginning of Joshua Ferris' To Rise Again At A Decent Hour. A couple of years ago I read Ferris' And Then We Came To The End, a Chicago novel, and liked it, so I had this one in mind when it came out and got good reviews. It was longlisted for the Man Booker and won the Dylan Thomas prize.
Sneaking in 'where the heart is broken' gives me a clue there's more going on here!
The blurb tells me that the narrator gets into some sort of identity theft trouble which causes him to rethink his life. I've only just started so I don't know much more. The only other dentist novel I know is Frank Norris' McTeague, which I read a long time ago, and is a terribly grim story. I'm hoping this is nothing like that. In any case our dentist narrator seems rather amusingly philosophical, which was not the case with McTeague the dentist.
He does seem "amusingly philosophical" as you say. I probably wouldn't have gone on if I hadn't seen the floss line.
ReplyDeleteI figured I had to include the floss line, which is what it takes to make it work.
DeleteAnything to do with the mouth makes me squimish so I don't think I could read about a dentist. See what we are featuring at Girl Who Reads
ReplyDelete