Why am I reviewing a children's book? My second grade son had to write a book report on a bibliography. He is a big baseball fan - like his father - so he picked Mickey Mantle. As most of you know, Mickey's exploits on the baseball field are certainly worthy of his hero status. However, some of his exploits off the field hardly are appropriate for a second grader. Trying to avoid discouraging my son from his selected topic, I searched Amazon and found "Mickey Mantle - Baseball Legends."

The book is fun and interesting, focusing on Mickey's humble beginnings and his baseball accomplishments. It is very readable and manageable for a young reader. Most importantly, the book is quite appropriate for its intended younger audience. It focuses on Mickey's baseball career while avoiding other elements of Mickey's life that younger children do not need to know. A child can enjoy the book and story, while adults do not have to fear its subject.

In movies, it's always a bad sign when supporting characters spend a lot of time telling the main character what a great dancer/singer/actor he or she is. You know that the climax, when the star opens his mouth or busts a move, is going to be a disappointment, if not an outright embarrassment.

Too many supporting characters in TEETH spend too much time telling the protagonist -- a thinly-veiled Hugh Gallagher, we must assume -- what a great writer/punk poet/cultural avatar he is. In fact, TEETH is riddled with lazy descriptions, trite satire, sloppy grammar, and suburban Irish-American angst that was tired twenty years ago.

There is a great novel to be written about Generation Y and the collapse of the 'zine culture, but this isn't it.

Hugh Gallagher brings together his family woes, writing career, and pop culture impressions in this novel to set the stage for what turns out to be a pretty accurate depiction of generation X. I disagree with those critics who feel that the use of thinly veiled famous rock bands (Rage Against the Chili Pepper), actresses (Gertie a.k.a. Barrymore), and rock tours (Chockapolacka a.k.a. Loolapalooza) shows a lack of originality from the author-it's called poetic license-and the blatant satire is really hilarious. Sure, the writing is often bland and repetitive (how many times will Neil's string of miseries be outlined for the reader?), but I enjoyed the quirky parallel between the status of Neil's teeth and the state of affairs in his life, i.e., his mouth turning into a festering pit as he hits a depressed, drugged-up, rock bottom.

I bought this book after the author himself told me about it at a rooftop party in New York years ago, and I regret that I didn't read it sooner. Gallagher has some fine-tuning to do, but will probably continue as a fine writer in the future.

Gallagher is the author of the now-famous college essay that is perhaps the single greatest essay written. With it, he established himself as a bold, fearless writer with an incredible sense of humor. I wish he was able to write a novel that consistently exhibited these same strong qualities.

Teeth is a fine, funny novel, its reasonably well written, the humor is brilliant and his characters are well developed. Yet there's something that keeps this from becoming a truly great novel. Perhaps is Gallagher's reliance on 90's clichés (yet Coupland's been able to pull it off and Bret Easton Ellis has used the entire decade of the 80's to his advantage). Gallagher satirizes the decade, its culture and its music with fake brand names, bands and magazines that are, perhaps, a little too close to their real counterparts (Rage Against the Chili Peppers?).

Overall, Teeth is good. Its worth reading and you won't regret picking it up. Contemporaries like Douglas Coupland, Brett Easton Ellis, and Dave Eggers have produced similar - probably better - novels but Gallagher's talent is well worth experiencing.