Sweet Tooth

by Yves Navarre

Book Overview

In a New York as gritty and brutal as Charles Bukowski's Los Angeles--a city of muggings, cockroach-infested apartments, dank hospitals, and casual murders--three characters cross paths and collide. Sweet Tooth is a book of anonymous sexual encounters and of lust that grades into love: a story by one of the most brilliantly uncompromising innovators of gay literature that shocks with candor and builds to an incredible climax. Its last line--Adventure...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1564784444
• ISBN13: 9781564784445
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

The French James Purdy

Navarre lists his own characters with the detached observation of a book reviewer and suggests a way to look at the plot of his novel to boot (p. 62): "Luc, thirty-three years old, a played-out journalist; Rasky, forty-seven years old, an overblown playboy; Lucy, forty-nine years old, a typist who has gone adrift; here in one act of forty chapters is an account of their attempt to run away from themselves." The book is a grim, unsparing allegory in which no character, at least no one French, will ever find happiness in New York, and thus it seems like a cautionary tale, and it certainly leaves one with the squeamish feeling that the next time you feel like having abandoned sex on the west side piers of Manhattan, don't. Just stay at home. Of course the piers are largely a closed chapter in gay New York history, and the scenes in which Luc wanders like a lonely cloud with his fly unzipped to reveal his white briefs to strangers, and comb the docks for anonymous sex, have a period charm Navarre (who died in 1994) could not have imagined during his lifetime. If the copy from Dalkey Archive can be credited, Newsday says that SWEET TOOTH is "a universally appealing tale about the difficulty of finding and keeping relationships." That has to be one of the most bizarre summings up of a book I have ever read! Rasky is dying of syphilis, which Navarre annoyingly personalizes as "Dame Syphy," and Luc comes to visit him from France. The two of them reminisce about lovers they've had and lovers they expect to have if they live. Luc meets a man of mixed race, half Puerto-Rican, half black, who works in a florist shop, and goes home with him. Big mistake. Maybe the mistake was calling him "Chocolate," as an endearment, that would enrage anyone. Butas I read through SWEET TOOTH it's clear that good taste wasn't Yves Navarre's forte. His strengths include his horrifying imagination, in which Luc's gradual torture and mental dismantling by his pickup are brilliantly evoked, as though James Purdy had written the scenario to Pasolini's "SALO." He's not very good at portraying women, if the typist Lucy is any indication. All she does of interest is go to the premiere of a Broadway musical called, "Pepper," a typical 70s flop, but one featuring a big title number Ethan Mordden would crack wise over, one in which the chorus boys and girls shout over and over again, "Pepper! Pepper! Pepper!" a la Jerry Herman's MAME or DOLLY. I'd rate it higher except for Donald Watson's tepid translation. Did Watson do this translation recently? I have the feeling Dalkey Archive is fobbing us off with an old piece of British crud. The UKisms in the text are glaring, "storey" for the floors in a building, "pants" for briefs or whatever, and so on and so forth amen. "Is your novel autobiographical," asks one New Yorker. "My novel is exobiographical: I drive out all those characters inside me who refuse to remain anonymous." Whatever the pros and cons of SWEET TOOTH, it is not a "uni

A gritty, brutal, and shocking chronicle of the dark side of American life

Ably translated by Donald Watson, Sweet Tooth by the award winning French novelist Yves Navarre (1940-1994) is a novel about a French journalist who comes to New York to see a dying former lover. The city he experiences is cold and unforgiving, prone to the macabre, consuming passions, and naked lust that wishes it were love. A gritty, brutal, and shocking chronicle of the dark side of American life, Sweet Tooth makes no attempt to veil the horrors of human nature's ugly side.