Teeth of the Dog

by Jill Ciment

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 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.

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

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 with her husband, Arnold Mesches, in Gainesville, Florida and Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

[Colton Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can see glimmers of Ciment’s genius here, but unfortunately, it’s layered under too many genre trappings to really shine. The small, human moments are evocative and memorable, but it all feels a little “this was exotic and quirky for the ‘90s.” I appreciated the unexpected direction the plot took about two-thirds in, and things really picked up from there, but the table-setting in the novel’s first half was like chopping through a jungle.

I will say no book has ever painted a better picture of what it feels like being in an unbearably stifling, hot environment, which is likely what I’ll remember from this book in a year’s time. Kudos to Jill for that, at least.

[Lizzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jill Ciment is my new fave author. I came to her by way of Alice Sebold's "Lucky" and "Lovely Bones." Sebold couldn't recommend her highly enough, and as difficult as "Lucky" and "Lovely Bones" were, well, I figured I had to give Ciment a try if I ever came across her.
Then, a Random House catalog came across the desk at the bookstore, and Jill's latest, "The Tattoo Artist" was coming out in softcover. Ordered one for the store and promptly forgot about it.
A few months later, the book arrived in a shipment, and the cover caught my eye, so I skimmed the first chapters. Here is a book that could have been just awful, but it's incredible. I don't know how to describe the characters or the story to you, except to say just read it.
Same for Teeth of the Dog. There are so many stories set on islands in the Pacific that make me roll my eyes and toss the book aside, but this isn't one of them. Ciment hooks you in clean and quick, and never lets go.
I'm tracking down "Half a Life" by her now.

[Gail · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a travelogue and thriller, and Ciment nails the atmospheric, raw, pained, and counterproductive elements of highly engaging characters. Her description of a teenaged prostitute took my breath away.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Vel Veeter]

This book has some blurbs on it that might speak to its influences, but not to its successes. We meet a couple on a small island country in the Pacific, an island divided into three very different principalities. The couple arrives and immediately becomes embroiled in some amount of local intrigue, but more so become the targets of a wayward American who eventually the wife in the couple sleeps with. In theory this would create a kind of love triangle, but in practice, because the wife is significantly older than the much frailer husband, this is a more complex relationship, or at least a much less, immediately disastrous one. The resulting tension comes from the young American’s increasing sense of entitlement to the wife’s affections and attentions.

But, because this is a more literary endeavor than a thriller one, those tensions tend to be more understated, less than liminal, and more fraught as we go forward, and because this is a literary novel and not a thriller, the inevitable fallout happens in much more recognizable ways. I don’t ultimately think this novel is as successful as those influences listed on the front, which include Graham Green and Paul Bowles primarily. I also don’t know why this novel….exists? I am not sure there are obvious questions about American couples’ roles in island countries as presented here that make for a novel that speaks to its own existence here, especially in 1998?

So I am let down and perplexed ultimately by this one.

[Kim Fay · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of a young woman and her older husband (who is dying of cancer) traveling to the Melanesian island of Vanduu, "Teeth of the Dog" captures a very specific environment that only travelers to third world countries know. Ciment's talent for honing in on just the right detail makes this book a clever anthropological exploration as well as a fine novel. It feels as if she has created an archetypical place upon which so many very real countries are fashioned. At the same time, this is a pager turner. A must for anyone who has ever put on a backpack and taken off around the world.

[Rachel McCready-Flora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jill Ciment's writing is impeccable. Teeth of the Dog had a feel reminiscent of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which Ciment references once or twice in the narrative. Although the themes of this book were difficult and unpleasant to muddle through (a dying spouse, infidelity, lonliness) and the setting an unbearably hot third world country (frankly, a tourist's nightmare), the story is quite gripping and well worth a reader's time.