The folks at New Directions, Krishna bless them, have put out a new series called “Bibelots”: small books, nicely designed, that pack a large punch. A couple of them are Muriel Spark's shorter novels, and one of those is her 1970 novel “The Driver's Seat.”
Yow.
In college, I wrote a paper on Muriel's novels. I read a few of them thoroughly, and a few of them very quickly. I only glanced at “The Driver's Seat.” It's only now, thirty-five years later, that I've actually read it carefully.
It is like acid in the face.
It is the story (told in the perpetual present tense, like several of her other novels) of a woman who intends to be a murder victim. (Or somehow she knows she will be a murder victim. Whichever. It makes no difference.) She takes a “vacation” from (probably) Denmark to (probably) Italy. She buys brightly-colored clothes and such, and makes a fuss along the way, so that everyone she meets will remember her. And she keeps looking for the man who's “her type.”
Which is to say: the man who will murder her.
And she meets him, and – horribly – everything happens right on schedule.
I first knew Muriel Spark through “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” Yes, the movie is lovely, and Maggie Smith is amazing as Jean Brodie. But the novel is ten times more amazing. It zigzags back and forth in time; it gives us Sandy Stranger, the student responsible for Jean Brodie's fall from grace, as a nun, struggling with what she's done years later.
Another of my favorite Spark novels has always been “The Abbess of Crewe,” a novelization of the American Watergate scandal, set in an Anglican convent, with lots of classic English poetry and prose thrown in. Dry, perfect, funny, beautiful. “Be still, be watchful.”
And there are her short stories, and her poems.
A beautiful craftswoman, and strange, and very perfect.
You will perhaps hear more from me on this subject.
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