Four interlocking narratives set in four American cities form a richly comic feast about love, academia, an elusive Tibetan novelist—and SOFA, a protest group so mysterious its very initials are open to interpretation.

Bad Teeth follows a cast of young literary men and women, each in a period of formation, in four very American cities—Brooklyn, Bloomington, Berkeley, and Bakersfield. A Pynchonesque treat, it’s four (or more) books in one: a bohemian satire, a campus comedy, a stoner’s reverie, and a quadruple love story. The plots coalesce around the search for a mysterious author, Jigme Drolma (“the Tibetan David Foster Wallace”), who might in fact be a plagiarist. But how does the self-styled arch-magician Nicholas Bendix figure into this? What will happen when SOFA unleashes the “Apocalypse”? And what’s to become of Lump, the cat?