The Tooth Fairy, by Graham Joyce, is a compelling and ultimately poignant coming-of-age story. Oh yes,and it’s also a weird fantasy novel. We follow the protagonist, Sam, and his friends from age four until they graduate from high school. The time is the 1960s, the place a working-class British town in the middle of nowhere (more or less). We get many of the usual, as well as some highly unusual, heterosexual-male childhood and adolescent traumas, having to do with parents and friends and authority and school and masturbation and girls and drugs; but we also get something more, because Sam is haunted by the Tooth Fairy, a foul-mouthed gender-shifter who originally appears to collect a fallen-out baby tooth, but keeps on coming back, insinuating to Sam, seducing him, repelling him, messing with his life, causing tragedies in all the people about him, and generally tormenting and obsessing him far beyond what his actual situation would seem to call for. Joyce leaves it an open question to what extent we should regard this apparition as “real,” and to what extent we can see it as just a kind of psychological projection. But the presence of the Tooth Fairy transfigures this otherwise more-or-less naturalistic story, giving it a haunting intensity that has absolutely nothing to do with the putrid, pseudo-poetic nostalgia that so often ruins adult reminiscences of childhood and adolescence. Instead, Joyce achieves the effect of a primordial beauty and terror amidst what is otherwise , and simultaneously, quotidian banality.
The Tooth Fairy
The Tooth Fairy, by Graham Joyce, is a compelling and ultimately poignant coming-of-age story. Oh yes,and it’s also a weird fantasy novel. We follow the protagonist, Sam, and his friends from age four until they graduate from high school. The time is the 1960s, the place a working-class British town in the middle of nowhere (more or less). We get many of the usual, as well as some highly unusual, heterosexual-male childhood and adolescent traumas, having to do with parents and friends and authority and school and masturbation and girls and drugs; but we also get something more, because Sam is haunted by the Tooth Fairy, a foul-mouthed gender-shifter who originally appears to collect a fallen-out baby tooth, but keeps on coming back, insinuating to Sam, seducing him, repelling him, messing with his life, causing tragedies in all the people about him, and generally tormenting and obsessing him far beyond what his actual situation would seem to call for. Joyce leaves it an open question to what extent we should regard this apparition as “real,” and to what extent we can see it as just a kind of psychological projection. But the presence of the Tooth Fairy transfigures this otherwise more-or-less naturalistic story, giving it a haunting intensity that has absolutely nothing to do with the putrid, pseudo-poetic nostalgia that so often ruins adult reminiscences of childhood and adolescence. Instead, Joyce achieves the effect of a primordial beauty and terror amidst what is otherwise , and simultaneously, quotidian banality.