Bad Teeth: A Novel
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