Teeth of the Dog [Hardcover]

Jill Ciment (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 16, 1999

The author of the critically hailed Half a Life steps boldly into world-class literary territory with this tightly structured yet richly expansive literary thriller that will call to mind the work of Graham Greene and Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky.

Thomas, a renowned American anthropologist, his much younger wife Helene, and Finster, a young, culturally shipwrecked AMR (American mercantile riffraff), as he's known locally, enact a tense personal drama of love and tragedy against the much larger historical drama of the Melanesian island of Vanduu, a steaming crucible where East and West, fundamentalist piety and free market fire, decay and sterility augur the future of the world.
        
Helene has lured Thomas to Vanduu in the desperate hope that its tropical splendor can miraculously heal the fracture that has cleaved their lives: Thomas's health is failing, and Helene simply can't accept that she might lose him. Unable to cope with the gulf of loneliness that his illness has opened between them, Helene finds herself growing more and more desperate as they tour this lush, clamorous paradise that turns out to be no paradise at all. And then Finster appears--young, louche, popping up everywhere Thomas and Helene happen to be, dogging Helene like a lovesick puppy. When a tragic mishap caused by their dance of three accidentally takes the life of a Vanduuan child, Helene, separated from both men, becomes a fugitive left to fend for herself on this troubled, surreal, inexplicably foreign speck of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
        
With a distilled emotional power and prose so tactile you can feel the eroticism and heat on every page, this riveting tale enacts large themes--the inevitable consequences of the hegemony of the American dream, the inexorable loss of a deep, adult love compared to the hopped-up sex-for-sale enticements Finster offers in its place, and a glimpse into what progress, with its spiraling allurements, has truly forfeited.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The mythical Melanesian island on which Teeth of the Dog is set is nothing if not lively. A Third World hash of shantytowns, strip clubs, bored hustlers, and uncertain electricity, Vanduu is abuzz not only with native lore and jarringly inescapable disco music but also with the unsettling palpitations of intrigue. In her fourth novel, Jill Ciment deftly weaves a tale of love and suspense into her colorful rendering of Vanduuan life, creating a story as tense as it is atmospheric. American vacationers Thomas and Helene Strauss, finding themselves underwhelmed by island amenities, spend much of the novel's first half glumly acknowledging the faltering trajectory of their marriage. Helene, years younger than her once-eminent anthropologist husband, has dragged him to this tourist-unfriendly backwater to--metaphorically and literally--get a rise out of him, prostate cancer having left him both world-weary and impotent. When Thomas suffers tragedy, and a dissolute American named Adam Finster preys on Helene's discontents, she's pitched into the sprawling and chaotic world of Vanduu with only her wits and Finster's help--perhaps--to save her.

"New world devours old," Finster recalls from Vanduuan lore. "The foam is the mark of its voracious appetite. Teeth of the dog, the natives call it." Moments like these, when Ciment depicts the jostling of cultures, are nearly as much fun as watching Helene try to transmute desperation, deciphering a world she'd rather not have visited. Brisk, lush, and mildly suspenseful, Teeth of the Dog, while something short of a thriller, nonetheless reveals a fascinating world as rich in danger as it is in uncertainty. --Ben Guterson

From Publishers Weekly

Ciment's (Half a Life) multilayered novel is a taut, intelligent literary thriller in which character and fate, and a yawning chasm of cultural differences, unite to cause tragedy. Distinguished anthropologist Thomas Strauss and his substantially younger wife, Helene, do not find much paradise in paradise, the Melanesian island of Vanduu. What they do find is a complex, frequently paradoxical culture where religious betel addicts have crimson-colored teeth, Rambo is available in Hindi and hotels all offer air-conditioning but not necessarily electricity. Also on Vanduu is Finster, a young, stoned-out American opportunist who, functioning as Miss Lonelyhearts of Oceania, imports cheap Woolworth perfume to sell to the Vanduuans as the ultimate aphrodisiac. With Thomas dying of prostate cancer, Helene loving him but yearning for physical attention and Finster wanting someone?anyone?Ciment creates a situation ripe for disaster. Increasingly menacing events occur: Thomas is stoned by villagers after he accidentally kills a child, and Helene finds herself in a run-for-your-life situation. Unfortunately for her, she learns that her presumed refuge, the U.S. consulate, is a virtual closed door: with Marcos no longer controlling the Philippines, Vanduu is the U.S.'s proposed new strategic ally in the Pacific, and placating the islanders takes precedence over Helene's safety. Ciment uses the island's physical isolation to reflect her characters' emotional insularity and to emphasize their role as outsiders in a dangerous atmosphere. When Helene, in mounting panic, turns to Finster for rescue, drink, drugs and sex complicate their plans. This ultimately sad and knowing tour of human frailty will serve to secure Ciment's reputation for intelligent themes and uncompromising prose.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 216 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1st edition (March 16, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517702029
• ISBN-13: 978-0517702024
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,805,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jill Ciment was born in Montreal, Canada. She is the author of Small Claims, a collection of short stories and novellas; The Law of Falling Bodies, Teeth of the Dog, The Tattoo Artist, and Heroic Measures, novels; and Half a Life, a memoir. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts, a NEA Japan Fellowship Prize, two New York State Fellowships for the Arts, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Ciment is a professor at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Like Her Writing Better Than The Tale, May 8, 2001

By 

taking a rest - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Teeth of the Dog (Hardcover)

Ms. Jill Ciment writes good dialogue, creates a very eccentric, quirky setting, and then populates it with some interesting players. Overall I thought the book was just an average to slightly above average read, but her style of writing surpasses the tale she tells this time around.

The setting for, "Teeth Of A Dog", is not so much a blend of cultures as the wreckage of what would be left after a variety of groups collided. With the cities, villages and the island upon which she sets her story, the population is more of an amalgam than of groups. She creates a place where the most extreme ends of the human spectrum should be set on removing the other, but they all seem to just get along either through necessity or apathy.

The couple of Helene and Thomas would be a bit odd if this had been set somewhere else. Even when the Author gives the background for the start of their relationship it's hard to tell if she is being serious or as outrageous as her island. Thomas is a renowned anthropologist whose fieldwork and studies are as clever as they are bizarre. The specific study the couple originally took together would probably make a great book in itself.

The character of Finster, an American dealing in dubious businesses through a haze of, "mariwana" is eccentric, quirky, and potentially dangerous when his hormones are guiding him. He does have his sympathetic/pathetic moments when the Author has him draw an outline of the woman he lusts after in the sand, and then has him lay next to it respectfully if not reverently.

The book begins rather uncertainly and develops until the circumstances lead to extremes that are so different from the balance of the book they read as if almost separate. Helene's reactions to the events that make her life skid toward madness on this island, that at it's best is a psychotic red light district and theme park was the strongest part of the book. As I mentioned the story was not a thrilling one, but this ladie's writing is excellent, and I look forward to reading more.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's riveting and will keep you up at night., April 3, 1999

By 

Nicole ([e-mail]) (Brooklyn) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Teeth of the Dog (Hardcover)

Teeth of the Dog is an incredible collage of social commentary and whalloping emotional content. It reads like a skillful thriller. You become so totally absorbed by the characters that you begin plotting what you would do in their situations, wanting to warn them to be a tad more reasonable or a little less passionate. What's especially well defined is the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. Ciment's watertight prose and sensual detail drops the reader in such a vivid place, that you may check your passport to see if it's stamped "Vanduu." With a bleak humor, she shows how our American pop culture and imperialism have wreaked havoc on the unsuspecting innocent in third world counties. In Teeth of the Dog, our collective behavior has come back to bite us in the butt. I loved the character of Finster...he had perfect sleaze-appeal, the dark Adam of paradise. I also adored Ciment's other book, Half a Life, and find myself giving her books as gifts frequently. You'll want to turn everyone you know on to Jill Ciment! Warming: if you loan this book out you probably won't get it back.

5.0 out of 5 stars A great read!, April 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Teeth of the Dog (Hardcover)

This novel has much to recommend it. I loved the language and the story. Most contemporary fiction leaves me bored and I've taken to not finishing most of the books I start. But Teeth of the Dog was different. I couldn't put it down, and even though I finished it over a week ago, I still think about it. It's been a very long time since a novel did that for me.