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Review by Leah Odze Epstein
The Sharp Teeth of Love is a rare gem of a novel: a meditation on the true nature of love that gets your pulse racing even as your mind lingers. Doris Betts has created an unusual hybrid -- a character-driven novel with the landscape of a Western, the pace of an adventure story, and the romance novel's focus on relationships between men and women.
Initially, protagonist Luna Stone seems an unlikely heroine: an average-looking introvert who sees herself "as a languid Elizabeth Barrett [Browning], delicate and abstemious . . ." and who feels that things happen to her by chance. Before long, however, Luna proves to be the most delicious kind of character (and Betts's specialty): a woman on the verge of a major life breakthrough.
As the novel opens, everything in Luna's life is settling into its conventional place. At 28, she is finally leaving her college town, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and heading cross country to California, where her movie-star-handsome fiance has landed an assistant professor position. There's nothing like an endless trip in an enclosed space for testing a relationship, and as soon as they hit the highway, Luna starts wondering how, as she listens to Steven's self-satisfied chatter, "either of them [would] endure this long drive together . . . " As they drive further west, Luna begins expressing doubts about their plan to get married in Reno, Nevada, and even suspects that on the rare occasions Steven really looks at her that he's "checking out his own double reflection in her eyes."
Many revelations later, while Steven gambles, Luna unloads his possessions from the van, leaves a goodbye note, and drives up into the High Sierras alone. Soon, she finds herself entangled with lives she never could have imagined as she is joined by Sam, a runaway boy escaped from a child porn ring; the ghost of Tamsen Donner, a nineteenth-century pioneer said to have frozen to death before she was eaten by a starving man; and Paul, a young would-be divinity student who is camping in the wilderness to avoid the noise that pains his newly deaf ears.
The three become inseparable until Sam's porn-ring pursuers recapture him. Without thought, Luna and Paul risk their lives in a frantic search for Sam that brings out reserves of strength they never knew they had. Brought together by chance, these three wounded people cling together out of need, choice, and finally, love.
A professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Doris Betts is the most satisfying kind of writer: one who is unafraid to show her characters at their hungriest, their most desperate and alone, during their unguarded moments when their "sharp teeth" are bared.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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