W A L 3 3 (1 ) SPRING 1 9 9 8 cultural tradition of storytelling. Moreover, it firmly establishes Irvin Morris as a talent to watch. The Sharp Teeth of Love. By Doris Betts. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 336 pages, $24-00. Reviewed by Charlotte M. Wright University of North Texas Press I expected to like The Sharp Teeth of Love because I loved Betts’s ear lier novel Heading West, in which librarian Nancy Finch from North Carolina is kidnapped and forced to drive into the West. She manages to escape her abductor only by a risky descent on foot trails into the Grand Canyon, a journey that symbolizes how useless are humanity’s “civilized” ways when pitted against the potentially fatal wildness of nature. The central character in The Sharp Teeth of Love, Luna Stone, is also a southern woman on a westward journey, and to Luna, likewise, the West is a dangerous place: “It’s hopeless. Too big. Just hopeless.” . . . She was still thinking of pioneer women shielding their eyes to stare at those impassable mountains, already in their minds giving up the rosebush, the piano, the box of books. She wondered if danger had proved to be an aphrodisiac. Maybe for the men. (28) Perhaps if Betts had remained focused on this theme of differing male and female responses to the West, the novel would have come together. But the artificial twists and turns of the plot fracture the theme rather than reinforce it: girl goes west with boy, intending to marry, but is scared by the western landscape and by her boyfriend’s response to it, so leaves him stranded at a Reno hotel. She goes camping at Lake Tahoe, where she is visited by a young male escapee from a child prostitution ring and by the ghost of Tamsen Donner, one of the Donner Party victims. Luna rescues the child, meets a more suitable love interest, loses the child to kidnappers, talks to Tamsen Donner again, rescues the child yet another time (this time with the help of her new boyfriend), and, finally, decides to move to the Midwest with her new beau and the boy and become a happy homemaker. That the reader must read about these incredible happenings in several dif ferent voices adds to the complexity and inaccessibility of the book. Emphasis on plot may indeed be at the root of the problem, when Betts’s strengths as a writer are, ordinarily, a glorious subtlety and incredible characterization. The Sharp Teeth of Love seems more didactic, more politi cally correct, and somehow less literary than the author’s previous works. ...