Teeth and the Man I Sing

Just finished: Sharp Teeth.

One last, short note on this.  I didn’t think about it much until I finished it — maybe I have allusion-fatigue after Welty — but the arc of this book’s plot does have some interesting parallels to the ancient epics, and especially the Aeneid.  It’s there explicitly in the first line, “Let’s sing about the man there…”

You have Lark losing his pack, wandering and finding comfort with a kind woman, then founding a new pack and going to war.  There are bits of Aeneas and bits of Odysseus here.  There’s maybe a sly reversal of the Circe myth in the story of Bonnie and Lark, in that unlike Circe changing Odysseus’s crew into wild beasts, Lark changes from dog to man under her nose, as she sleeps the sleep of the drugged.  Bonnie seems to kind of be Dido and Circe and Calypso and Penelope, at various times.

There’s also Venable’s great soliloquy in the third book (p. 175), on the violence to the earth done by the sprawling L.A. megalopolis.  The taming of the Italian wilderness, and the violence of that civilizing, is a theme that runs through the Aeneid, as well.

It’s all fairly subtle, and restrained.  Does seem to be there, though.