 Sweet Tooth is a love story, a spy novel, and a book about literature itself. Serena and her boyfriend Haley – she a well-read but uncritical lover of literature, he a highly accomplished writer and literary scholar – have different attitudes towards literature. Serena prefers a realist approach, where life in the book reflects real life. Haley on the other hand is of a more modernist school, and enjoys experimentation in his work. McEwan plays with these differences, firstly by placing himself in the novel and blurring the line between author and character, and secondly by writing what appears to be a straight first-person narrative, only to distort this perception at the very end.
