For a man who has made a career out of holding anything and everything in disdain, Gore Vidal is awfully generous with his frequent book-jacket blurbs. In the latest, he proclaims Teeth, by first-time novelist Hugh Gallagher, to be "finally, the dental masterpiece we've all been waiting for." Vidal's credibility can be salvaged only if that comment is read sarcastically; it improves somewhat as it goes along, but Teeth is no masterpiece, dental or otherwise. Gallagher is most famous for his 1990 college-application essay that anyone with an e-mail account has probably received 10 times over ("I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice… I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy… But I have not yet gone to college.") While that's clever enough, the NYU education it helped Gallagher obtain, as well as his eight years' experience writing for various publications, ought to have sharpened his skills a bit. There's very little evidence of this in Teeth, however. Part juvenile satire, part stereotypical Gen-X angst-wringing—the protagonist has parents whose only purpose seems to be to serve as a source of psychological distress—Teeth is a shallow, bratty book that hides coffee-shop profundities beneath a veneer of world-weary prose. The story concerns the travels and travails of Neil, a young writer of Irish descent. Unemployed after the collapse of his employer Dusted ("the seminal underground mag of the early '90s"), Neil is set adrift in a world populated by thinly disguised public figures. In place of MTV VJ Kennedy, we have Johnson; there's a rock/hip-hop band called Rage Against The Chili Pepper. Unfortunately, nothing in the book's first third is much more clever than those names—it can only be counted a success if read as a parody of a satire—and Teeth improves only slightly once Neil's quest becomes international, away from such easy, clumsily attacked targets. In Java, he finds some insultingly portrayed natives, and in London, revolutionary squatters serve to complete his disillusionment with the punk ethos. Through it all, Teeth's protagonist must deal with the problem suggested by the title: a set of damaged dental equipment (and a transparent metaphor) that he refuses to have mended. One character scolds, "Why do you hang on to that stupid pain of yours? Why don't you want to fix it?" By the end, of course, he has, but it scarcely matters. While there are moments that suggest Gallagher might turn out a decent novel at some point, Teeth isn't it.