Bad Teeth - Hardcover

Long, Dustin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 054426200X ISBN 13: 9780544262003

Publisher: New Harvest, 2014

Synopsis

Four interlocking narratives set in four American cities form a richly comic feast about love, academia, an elusive Tibetan novelist and SOFA, a protest group so mysterious its very initials are open to interpretation.

"Bad Teeth" follows a cast of young literary men and women, each in a period of formation, in four very American cities Brooklyn, Bloomington, Berkeley, and Bakersfield. A Pynchonesque treat, it s four (or more) books in one: a bohemian satire, a campus comedy, a stoner s reverie, and a quadruple love story. The plots coalesce around the search for a mysterious author, Jigme Drolma ( the Tibetan David Foster Wallace ), who might in fact be a plagiarist. But how does the self-styled arch-magician Nicholas Bendix figure into this? What will happen when SOFA unleashes the Apocalypse ? And what s to become of Lump, the cat?"

About this title

About the Author

Dustin Long is the author of Icelander. He is currently finishing a Ph.D. in American Literature, and he teaches literature at a private institution in Manhattan. He lives in Brooklyn with his fiancee and son.

Reviews

For his second novel, Long (Icelander, 2007) departs from invented villages and a murder mystery to focus on the lives of young intellectuals and aspiring literati in four very real American cities: Brooklyn, Bloomington, Berkeley, and Bakersfield. The novel shifts focus with each section, beginning with Judas, a literary translator searching for a reclusive Tibetan author. Disillusioned with SOFA (a hilarious send-up of Occupy Wall Street), Judas travels to Indiana and crashes with Adam, a frustrated writer with a serious drinking problem. In California, Adam’s former lover, a procrastinating PhD student named Selah, becomes entangled in the shady doings of her newfound boyfriend. The plotlines twist into a series of quick cuts between seemingly incidental characters, collapsing finally into a kind of narrative singularity. Throughout, Long interjects explanatory footnotes, philosophical musings on the nature of creativity, and enticing insights from the anonymous narrator. Packed with allusions to American letters, in tune with the current climate of competitive academia, and playfully aware of its own fictive devices, Long’s novel, with its savvy humor, intelligent satire, and rewarding prose, is wildly successful. --Diego Báez

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Part One

Brooklyn

I turn now to a tale
so wrong no tongue can tell
it all, no pen record
it to its final word;
throats fail
and letters will not spell.
   —Magnus Valison, The Oneiriad, Canto 168

She was a cool black woman in a long dress and boxy spectacles, and she eventually taught Judas to score and unfold a mango so that it would yield bite-size cubes of flesh. “You look lost,” she said.
   They were standing in a dim, converted office space from which all of the cubicles had been recently ripped: outlines remained indented in a carpet the color of television snow. In one corner a longhaired DJ in a purple-and-blue vertical-striped blazer did his best to mix the danceable with the passably hip, though the floor was too crowded to permit much actual dancing. A bar at a table in the corner opposite was where the crowd was at its thickest, a young man and younger woman providing red plastic cups filled with either of two varieties of cheap wine or one variety of cheap beer; a tip jar reminded partygoers that this was a fund-raiser.
   “What?” said Judas stupidly, a bit bewildered by the volume of the music.
   The party was being held to celebrate the release of the fourth issue of a literary magazine called E. The title was supposed to be something like a joke, as the full cover text read, “E: modern cultural criticism,” and they were trying to bring new energy to the literary scene. But those who got the joke tended to say, “That’s kind of funny,” instead of laughing, whereas those who had it explained to them just said, “Oh.” The price of admission to the party was a ten-dollar donation (which also bought a copy of the magazine) or to help unload the issues from the truck at the E office a few blocks away. Judas had paid.
   “Do you have a cigarette?” the woman asked.
   Patting his pockets though he hadn’t carried cigarettes in over ten years, since the end of college, worried as he’d been that they would stain his teeth: “No, sorry.”
   “It’s okay. I’m trying to quit. Do you just want to step outside with me and get some air, then?”

 

“Gabriel asked me to save you,” she explained once they were out beneath a lamp on the wet reflective street, half a block down from a hacking of smokers; she almost had to yell to be heard above the Q train shrieking overhead. It must have rained since the party’s start, but it had since cleared up. The lamp shone orange—tingeing her tight-curled hair, catching the corners of her glasses—and her face looked golden beneath it.
   Judas shivered; it wasn’t cold, but he wished he’d worn his hoodie if only as one further item of familiarity, protection against the alien all around him. His stuff (books, clothes, dishes, and a few small pieces of furniture) had not yet arrived from California—and he’d only brought three changes of outfit in his backpack on the plane—so he’d shown up at this party short-haired and baby-faced, wearing baggy jeans, off-brand tennis shoes, and a grey T-shirt emblazoned in blue with the single word berkeley. Most everyone else was dolled up to some extent, including this woman, but he told himself he didn’t feel embarrassed; rather, he felt a vague sense of Californian pride.
   Attending this party was nearly the first thing he had done since arriving in Brooklyn. He’d dropped off some things at his new apartment, and he’d taken a long stroll around the neighborhood: great pizza parlor, though most of the other restaurants would be out of his price range if he stayed jobless for very long; convenient access to three major subway lines; and only a few blocks’ walk from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, from which he could take in the entire panorama of Manhattan. “All of those people,” he’d said aloud upon sight of it. “And all of them have lives, and most of them have genitals.” He slept alone that night, but the next night he attended this party.
   “My name’s Caissa,” the woman said (kah-EE-suh).
   He told her his name, and she immediately smiled as if she understood some hidden profundity in his statement. “Are you an E-tard, too?”
   He gaped for a moment. “I’m not sure how to answer that. I’m not one of the editors of E, if that’s what you mean.”
   “Oh, do you have a piece in the new issue or something?”
   He shook his head. “I’m not really a writer.”
   “Not really?”
   “I’m a translator, not a writer.”
   “A lover, not a fighter.” She nodded. “That’s a relief.”
   She spoke these words only out of some associational echolalia, but there was as much truth in her statement as in his. Judas had never had the discipline to follow through on any writing of his own, but he had an innate love of translation, decoding the text of another and recoding it for himself; he’d even made a little money the previous year from the translation of a Chinese detective novel that he’d done for the University of California Press. And while he usually went out of his way to avoid direct conflict, favoring the path of passive-aggression, loving—which is to say being in love—had always come naturally to him. He’d tried to explain it once to Hannah, the girl he’d left behind in Berkeley; it’s unknown exactly what he said to her, but she interpreted it as something like this: “I occasionally find other women alluring, for one reason or another. In some cases it’s physical attraction; in other cases it has purely to do with personality—usually some combination of the two. And every woman I find alluring, even as a friend, is a woman I’d like to sleep with, at least once. The thought invariably crosses my mind. However, my love for you is so powerful that it not only eliminates this desire but inverts it. I actively wish not to sleep with these women, as I realize that such an action would hurt you.” Whatever he’d said had been meant as a compliment, but it hadn’t been taken that way.
   “Frankly, I’m not a big fan,” Caissa said. It took Judas a moment to realize that she was still talking about E, but then she went on at length to explain the basis of her aversion. “Martin actually told me once that the reason there aren’t any good ‘ethnic’ writers is because they all write about ethnicity,” she said at one point. “I don’t even know where to begin with that, but then he also said it was a waste of time to write about atrocities in Sierra Leone when the real revolutionary ideas that are going to advance the world are being conceived in New York. Which is completely ignoring SOFA, seemingly on no other basis than the fact that it started on the West Coast. And as if we really need more media devoted to the ideas of New York intellectuals. And when the big, new idea for the new issue is ‘the environment.’ Seriously? How revolutionary.”
   “Martin Pope?” Judas asked. “That’s Gabriel’s roommate, right? I think I just met him and his girlfriend. Jasmine?”
   Caissa snorted. “ ‘Girlfriend’ is a strong word. On again, off again—mostly ‘off again’—but yes. He’s Gabriel’s roommate. As close as he comes to dating anyone, I suppose: that girl, not Gabriel.”
   “You sound as if you’ve dated him yourself.”
   She stared at Judas in silence for a second. “Shall we head back to the party?”

Edition details

• Publisher: New Harvest
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 054426200X
• ISBN 13: 9780544262003
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320