Amanda Hagood
“That was the thing about parents,” reflects protagonist Sammie Lucas in Kristen Arnett’s new novel, “With Teeth” (Riverhead Books, 2021). “They fucked you up royally even when they were trying their best.”
For Arnett’s fans, the flippant sincerity of this sentiment will come as no surprise – and neither will the fact that this thought occurs while Sammie is balancing on top of a chest, surrounded by piles of new clothes she has tried on and hated, waiting for her sullen teenage son to come and crush a cockroach she is pathologically afraid of. Arnett’s debut novel “Mostly Dead Things” also explored survival in the embrace of a loving but dysfunctional family, and also included a generous dose of Florida wildlife (most of it taxidermied).
“With Teeth” follows Sammie through her relationships to her beautiful but distant wife, Monica, and her saturnine son, Samson, whose deeply buried feelings spill out in bizarre and violent ways. From the novel’s opening scene, in which Sammie sprints across a playground to stop a little-kid Samson from getting into a truck with a stranger, Sammie’s journey is tinged with ragged, stomach-churning doubts: anxieties about parenting a difficult child; resentment at Monica’s growing emotional absence; the lingering pain of being rejected by her fundamentalist parents, who see her queerness as an abomination.
Vignettes told from the point of view of minor characters are interlaced through Sammie’s story and offer worrying evidence that Sammie’s self-doubt may be descending into a dangerous state of instability – a question which the novel’s heart-stopping final chapters bring to light.
There is a deep, unrelenting sorrow in Arnett’s novel, but there are also moments so transcendently weird and so emotionally pitch-perfect that I found myself laughing out loud: The time that Sammie helps Samson create a “doll” version of himself for a school project and wakes in the middle of the night to find it creepily staring at her from the pillows. A sexting-gone-wrong incident in which Sammie sends a racy picture of herself not to her new girlfriend but, accidentally, to her estranged wife.
In the end, it’s no surprise that Arnett begins “With Teeth” with an epigraph from Flannery O’Connor, that notoriously strange Georgia author who once quipped that Southern writers tended to write about freaks “because we are still able to recognize one.” Sammie’s creeping sense of freakishness speaks to deep wells of loneliness and despair that lie beneath the surface of many lives. Most of us are content to simply ignore or repress, but Arnett reaches in and pulls out a gem of a story.
The Gabber’s book club will discuss With Teeth at its June 6 book club. Sea Dog Cantina, 2832 Beach Blvd. S., Gulfport. June 6: 6:30 p.m., pre-game; 7 p.m., book discussion. 727-321-6965.
