"Sweet Tooth" by Ian McEwan (2012)

Ian McEwan's novel is a permutation of stereotypes about times, places, and people. His tone is that of a tutor delivering a lesson: competent, respectful, detached, pleasant, engaging, and faintly condescending. There is nothing singular about the characters; these are the circumstances that make these characters interesting, not the other way around.

McEwan hides behind the back of a boyish writer, Tom, slouched at the typewriter that impresses the very pages that the reader ends up swooshing on his touchscreen. Lovestruck and hence stuck with his protagonist, Tom relives, fills in, and retouches his own and borrowed memories.

The novel concludes with three non sequiturs, supplied by Tom: (i) English majors are better than mathematicians, (ii) Sussex is better than Cambridge, and (iii) "marry me."

Discovering how to align individual self-interest with the social good and explaining this alignment to voters have been among the most valuable pursuits of the twentieth century.