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Drivers Seat

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The bleakest of Muriel Spark's twenty-one novels, 1971's 'The Driver's Seat' provides its audience with a short, harrowing ride, one often without apparent course or destination.

Written in uncomfortable second-person present, the reader becomes an immediate and hesitating witness to the last days in the life of Lise, the book's erratic, exacting, and strangely confrontational anti-heroine. 'The Driver's Seat' is, among other things, a piercing indictment of both the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of Western sixties culture and the radical break with traditional that the decade represented.

Spark pulls off a clever literary coup in the opening paragraph of the third chapter, when she casually reveals the novel's catastrophic ending. By defusing the book's forward motion and the reader's expectations of reaching a climax in the routine manner, Spark forces the reader to look away from the narrative to understand the book's theme and meaning.

Lise, 34, is a product of scrubbed clean and prepackaged modern society, and is or has become a kind of tight-lipped clockwork cog blandly caught in the dull hierarchical social and economic machinery of life. Emotionally sterile and spiritually vacant, only the briefest glimpses into the inner workings of Lise's mind are made available.

However, Lise, who habitually erupts into unprovoked barking laughter, has had "years of illness" of the psychological kind, the results of which have left her office coworkers quietly terrified of her presence. Lise is a walking pathology, a brittle death's head effigy who is likely to collapse or collapse a building at any moment should her precarious self regulating control system fail.

Lise is a shark fin cutting the surface of life, a breathing but not necessarily living crash-test dummy, a combustible wax work 'other' lacking a genuine human presence and an authentic resemblance to mankind. Spark hilariously underscores Lise's tragic monstrousness by giving her the Bride of Frankenstein's hairstyle, skunk stripe rising up from middlebrow to high pile above.

Subtly coerced by her coworkers to take a vacation, Lise already has extensive plans to do so. She will travel by plane from her own unnamed northern country (probably Sweden) to an unnamed southern country (most likely Italy), leaving behind her modern pine-walled apartment, which has been constructed so that all furniture and appliances fold smoothly away into the walls (even the toilet). Lise keeps the few visible household trappings perfectly ordered and devoid of personal touches, leaving the apartment like a hotel room in a perpetual state of readiness for the next guest. Lise's home is her 'pine box.'

Only elderly, sweet-natured, and met-along-the-way traveling companion Mrs. Fiedke, who can neither see nor hear properly, can stomach Lise's company as Lise searches endlessly for a "boyfriend" she is unable to recognize or describe.

In an effort to assist, Mrs. Fiedke asks, "Will you feel a presence? Is that how you'll know?" "Not really a presence," Lise famously replies, "the lack of an absence, that's what it is." Strangely, Lise becomes briefly more human as the narrative winds to a close; she momentarily regrets the plan she has precipitated, even while there is still more than enough time to bring it to a halt. She misses "the lonely grief" of home, and offhandedly says, "I wished my parents had practiced birth control." Readers will find Lise's brief manifestation of humanity starkly poignant.

By revealing that Lise's present condition has been partially caused by her being "neither pretty or ugly," and her continuing isolation due to her intrinsic status as a nondescript person in a world of mediocre, bland, and unremarkable people, Spark underscores the process by which some individuals perpetually overlooked as 'ordinary' can become extraordinary deviant and dangerous.

Encouraging already indistinct members of society to assume generic personalities and rigid, conformist lifestyles, Spark seems to be saying, doesn't force the evolution of the New Man, but causes permanent spiritual deformities and creates abominations.

'The Driver's Seat' is filled with eccentric characters, but unlike other Spark novels, there are no outright sinister eccentrics other than Lise. 'The Driver's Seat' equates evil with processed sterility and blankness rather than with the more traditional concepts of Christian sin and violation of grace and virtue.

Here, vacuous stupidity (when Lise and Mrs. Fiedke are surrounded by cavorting hippies, shrewd Mrs. Fiedke says, "They are hermaphrodites. It isn't their fault"), solipsism, witless opinion, groundless protest, and trendy hedonism are merely the new norm, the to be expected detritus of newly-destabilized Western life.

Even meek Mrs. Fiedke, representing the decaying old guard, believes all "homosexuals should be put on an island" and doesn't hesitate to say so. In 'The Driver's Seat,' both civilization and nature, both the old order and the new, are at a dead end.

In an absurd world, can a person seize complete control of his or her destiny? If so, to what degree, and to how many possible outcomes? Can man successfully usurp God's role? These are the questions Spark raises and unsettlingly addresses here.

A story of a woman in search of the perfect man, and of two people perfectly suited for one another finally meeting, 'The Driver's Seat' turns every fairytale notion about courting painfully upon its head.

Upon finishing the book, Spark is said to have landed in the hospital, apparently suffering nervous strain and exhaustion, which gives potential readers a hint of its macabre power.

I'm surprised to see that there is no review posted for this book. It was a gem of a find for me, one of those books that I found while browsing for nothing in particular, and it sounded interesting at the very least. Since then I have come to enjoy Muriel Spark very much, though for nostalgic reasons this book remains one of my favorites. I have read it time and time again, and it's one of those rare experiences that lingers each time.

The book chronicles the vacation holiday of an unsettled, eccentric woman named Lise who is searching for her "boyfriend" in another city. To say more would be to give away wonderful, dissident chords within the book. I think it's one of the greatest parts of the experience Spark gives her readers- it's all a bit off-key, a bit awkward, a bit like watching a train as it lumbers down the track with the knowing that something bad is going to happen. The book follows none of the orthodoxies of most writing, at least in my mind, because while there is an obvious beginning and end, one gets the impression that much of the implied story began a very long time ago and that the future of Lise might include stalking the streets of this foreign city and its more benign tourists. I left my first reading with more questions than answers, but it was a very good thing within this context. There is nothing in Lise that can be contained very efficiently, including what one might expect of her, and so while the story ends in the shortterm with the insertion of the back of this tiny book, somewhere in the mind it is possible for Lise to continue to wander aimlessly through the imagination and the many doors found there.

As effective as the characterization, the sparse narrative is eerie and fantastic and shows restraint where others might provide a deluge of interesting yet ineffectual description and leaves us wanting more in many cases. But, like a scolded child we realize that- as the title implies- there is another who knows better than we who is maneuvering this vehicle and we are totally at her disposal. As a reader, this book was about acceptance and a certain amount of perseverence, because there were times when I truly felt dread reading about Lise and the assortment of characters that she encounters on her journey. It's a book I have never forgotten and one that sticks out in my mind as one of the better pieces I've had the pleasure of reading.

I recommend this book to those who enjoy subtle, creeping turmoil instead of the blood and monsters that pepper popular suspense. This is not about the man with the axe around the next corner, or the modern psychopath stalking their prey. At least, it's not clearly any of these things. It is the bubbling of something more than every-day-ho-hum under the surface of what appears normal (if slightly eccentric) human behavior, and it's got plenty of twists in store for those who decide to take it on. A wonderfully scary book, and a symphony of slightly sour notes building to a creepy, determined finale.

There is no writer more despicable than the reviewer who spoils a book by revealing significant plot points.

[Okay, no writer who opines about the arts. Some political commentators come to mind who are surely destined for a special hell.]

But what do you call a novelist who begins the third chapter --- the third chapter --- of her book with this about Lise, the main character:

"She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man's necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is traveling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14."

Try this: genius.

The Driver's Seat is just l00 pages. It will take most of you about an hour. But in that hour, you are in for an experience even more head-splitting than you'll get from Jim Thompson's aptly named The Killer Inside Me.

Because --- obviously --- this book is about something considerably trickier than who-gets-killed.

So the first brilliance of Muriel Spark's writing is its stunning originality; this is a book that really makes sense only backwards, when you finally have all the information to understand what happened. A close second is the writing. "Surgical" is often used to describe Spark's prose, and in this, her most unsettling novel, you can see why.

In a line here, a line there, we learn that Lise is 34 years old. She lives in the north of Europe, perhaps Sweden. She has worked in an accounting office since she was 18, with the exception of "the months of illness" --- and from the clothes she buys in the opening chapters and her strained, off-balance encounters with other people in the first few pages, we clearly get she's had a breakdown and is now having another. She lives alone. She's no oil painting:

"Her lips, when she does not speak or eat, are normally pressed together like the ruled line of a balance sheet, marked straight with her old-fashioned lipstick, a final and a judging mouth, a precision instrument, a detail-warden of a mouth; she has five girls under her and two men."

A dull woman? That's just the point. You'd never notice her, but on the last day of her life, you'd certainly feel her --- and you'd find her really creepy. The customers in a clothes store feel her; she makes them "gasp and gape". Her co-workers sit, silently, as she tells them, through hysterical laughter and tears, that her vacation will be "the time of her life." And on the plane that takes her south, presumably to Italy, she so terrifies the man next to her that he bolts out of his seat.

On and on it goes, a nightmare of inappropriate conversation, off-putting behavior, fevered action. She's supposed to have a date with her dream man --- where is he? "The torment of it," Lise says. "Not knowing exactly where and when he's going to turn up."

What's going on here? Is this a thriller? A search for the dream man that suddenly veers from romance to violence? There are cops jumping in from time to time --- is this a detective novel?

All of the above. And more. With a resolution you don't see coming and then can't see how it could have ended any other way.

"The Driver's Seat" was published --- as "a metaphysical thriller" --- in 1970. Spark was already a literary powerhouse, thanks to "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", her 1962 novel about a spinster schoolteacher in Edinburgh, Scotland. It had been published --- in its entirety --- in The New Yorker. On stage, it starred Vanessa Redgrave. Completing the triumph was the 1969 film, starring Maggie Smith, who won an Oscar for best actress in the title role.

"The Driver's Seat" was immediately recognized as a new kind of book: a traditional, last-day-of-life narrative, told with uncommon brevity and objectivity. Spark wrote more than twenty novels; this was one of her favorites. And her most prescient: you can see the accuracy of this close study of alienation and dislocation on the faces of untold people walking on any street. Or just watch the quirky, disturbing movie version of "The Driver's Seat" --- with Elizabeth Taylor in the leading role and Andy Warhol in the cast.

Muriel Spark wrote her novels in composition books, using one side of the page. No typewriters or computers for her --- she preferred pens that were not just new, but never touched by others. Rewriting? To her, that was the pastime of hacks; she rarely revised.

"The Driver's Seat" is proof she didn't need to.

In this short sharp shock of a novel, Muriel Spark converts cliché into reality. How often has one heard, after news of a reported rape, or murder, or both, the facile comment "She asked for it"? From the outset of "The Driver's Seat" we know the fate that awaits the strange, driven, calculating Lise; and it is a signal indication of Spark's unsparing skill that the reader is trapped in suspense nonetheless. To read this tale takes little more than an hour because, once you start it, it will not leave you alone till it is done. Spark demonstrates what "asking for it" would in fact entail; and permits us to judge for ourselves the distance between that, and being the genuine victim of such a crime---through the sheer power of storytelling alone.

I loved this book and couldn't put it down. I've read several of Spark's books and other than the "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", I have not been this enthusiastic. This one has madness, mystery, murder and humor of all things. At 117 pages, it's a quick read and the perfect book to take on your next flight, you'll find yourself looking at your fellow passengers in a different light.

A black comedy tour de force.

Muriel Spark's most famous novel, THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE, was published in its entirety in the early 60s in THE NEW YORKER. Nearly a decade later they repeated this by published her short novel THE DRIVER'S SEAT in the same fashion. Although the later work is not nearly as famous as BRODIE, it sometimes has been called her best work of fiction; it certainly is her most shocking, and shows Spark at the peak of her abilities.

The novel (more of a novella) centers upon the last day of life of Lise, a single woman working for an accounting firm somewhere in Northern Europe (the country is never specified). Mentally unsound, Lise has decided to take a vacation to a "Southern" city (which may be Rome) to find her type; we discover relatively early that Lise will be found stabbed the next day, and as the narrative progresses we come to understand that what Lise calls "my type"--the man for which she searches--is not an ideal lover but an ideal murderer. But Lise does not seem to be the only unstable figure in the novella: many of the people she encounters behave as strangely as she does, so that it begins to seem as if Lise's madness is merely symptomatic of her larger cultures. (Figures from the late 60s youth movements appear in the story, as does an odd character attracted to Lise who espouses the benefits of macrobiotic diets and something like an orgasmic theory of sexual health.) The novella is easy to finish in one sitting, propelled as it is by the engine of dread it engenders by its mentions of Lise's horrible doom for which she so meticulously planned. THE DRIVER'S SEAT is much better known in the United Kingdom than in the United States; the unappealing and badly designed cover New Directions has provided for the current edition is likely part of the problem.

Both the most energetic and most chilling of the Muriel Spark fiction that I've read, "The Driver's Seat" is an existential novella that reads like an absurdist death sentence (think of Kafka's story "The Judgment"), an elaborate program of doom for an unhinged woman wandering the streets of Naples who is unable to make even a single good decision. This is Spark at her unsettling, post-modern, subversive best.

Who else can let you know at the start how the story's to end and yet hold your tension to the last? This is a brilliant piece which shows her originality and dark dry humor.

From the start of this story it is clear that the protagonist - Lise (pronounced Lees, or Lies?) - is living in a fantasy.

The foreshadowing, sometimes subtle sometimes obvious, allows Spark to play around with the genres of the thriller, the detective story and the holiday romance. But it is in the self-consciously deliberate way that Muriel Spark at the same time obscures and reveals Lise to us that the genius of the author is demonstrated.

It's not a happy holiday read, it is an addictive and provocative story, told with considerable narrative skill.

Il faut avoir vu le film de Patroni Griffi tiré de cette "novella" avant de la lire. Ainsi, le lecteur aura en permanence à l'esprit le visage de Liz Taylor , un peu moins hystérique que la Liz de Muriel Spark, mais parfaite.

Le film est disponible en dvd.