The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver's Seat, The Only Problem (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) [Hardcover]

Muriel Spark (Author)

Book Description

Series: Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics | Publication Date: April 6, 2004

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

The brevity of Muriel Spark’s novels is equaled only by their brilliance. These four novels, each a miniature masterpiece, illustrate her development over four decades. Despite the seriousness of their themes, all four are fantastic comedies of manners, bristling with wit.

Spark’s most celebrated novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, tells the story of a charismatic schoolteacher’s catastrophic effect on her pupils. The Girls of Slender Means is a beautifully drawn portrait of young women living in a hostel in London in the giddy postwar days of 1945. The Driver’s Seat follows the final haunted hours of a woman descending into madness. And The Only Problem is a witty fable about suffering that brings the Book of Job to bear on contemporary terrorism.

All four novels give evidence of one of the most original and unmistakable voices in contemporary fiction. Characters are vividly etched in a few words; earth-shaking events are lightly touched on. Yet underneath the glittering surface there is an obsessive probing of metaphysical questions: the meaning of good and evil, the need for salvation, the search for significance.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Muriel Spark is one of the few writers on either side of the Atlantic with enough resources, daring, and stamina to be altering, as well as feeding, the fiction machine…We are never out of touch in a Spark novel with the happiness of creation; the sudden willful largesse of magic and wit, the cunning tautness of suspense.”–John Updike, The New Yorker

“One of our greatest living novelists.” –The Times

“Spark’s powers of invention are apparently inexhaustible.” –Commonwealth

“[Spark is] one of this century’s finest creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment.” –New York Times

“Some of [Spark’s] finest fictions are novellas rather than novels, short enough to be read in a single dizzying sitting.” –David Lodge

“[Spark] has written some things that seem likely to go on being read as long as fiction in English is read at all.” –New York Times Book Review

Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Everyman's Library (April 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400042062
• ISBN-13: 978-1400042067
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.2 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #337,239 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary and chilling, April 23, 2008

By 

Robert B. Rossney (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver's Seat, The Only Problem (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) (Hardcover)

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is, as Tom Farber said of Evan Connell's Mrs. Bridge, satire written with a scalpel. It's precise and sharp, and you also get the feeling things are being laid open and cut away. At times she is as cruel and cold (consider Mary, for instance, whose stupidity is described with disdain even as she is dying horrifically). You have to have a certain amount of tolerance for an author who just isn't very nice.

This is a novel of exceptional complexity that reads like a simple little story of a bygone time. It's worth reading again and again.

And The Girls of Slender Means is, if anything, even better. In it's construction it's a little like one of the locked-room mysteries that Agatha Christie wrote, only it's about something much more upsetting than some vicar getting kacked in the rectory.

Ian McEwan would give his front teeth to be able to write novels like these.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You must read this!, September 8, 2009

By 

Renee C. Ozer (Colorado Springs, CO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver's Seat, The Only Problem (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) (Hardcover)

I ordered this book as part of my Recession Reading Strategy (cheap classics). Muriel Spark's writing was astoundingly varied, but all the novellas have in common not-very-nice characters who embody not-very-nice human characteristics, hypocrisy front and center. Her novellas feature flash forwards and lots of casual sex, and are very, very funny.
There's a lot of religious imagery here - the louche character in The Girls of Slender Means who is shocked into the priesthood when he witnesses a girl running back into a burning building to rescue a Schiaparelli evening gown, clambering over her doomed roommates in the process. (And yet, being too heavy to squeeze through a narrow window, she could have done nothing substantive for them, anyway.) In The Only Problem, a rich man who has retired to the French countryside to write a monograph on the Book of Job goes through his own trials with friends and press when his estranged wife goes from cheap, fashionable "revolutionary" sentiment (stealing gas-station chocolate) to leading her own little Baader-Meinhof Gang.
The Driver's Seat is a just plain creepy tale of a woman looking for "her type," in this case someone to violently kill her.
All are darkly funny - the crazy macrobiotic vegan who must have his orgasm a day, the sanctimonious aunt who travels to France to berate her nephew for his blasphemy and to sadly inform him that she has seen footage in a television documentary showing his wife climbing out of a double sleeping bag naked, adultery in a sack!, notable mainly for besmirching the family name.
Spark's father was Jewish and her mother, Anglican, and she later converted to Roman Catholicism. She was a wild child herself, and complained of her whiny artist son in unmotherly dialogue straight out of her own writing, "He can't sell his lousy paintings, and I have had a lot of success. He keeps sending them to me and I don't know what to do with them. I can't put them on my wall. He's never done anything for me, except for being one big bore."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A little weird, but fascinating, March 10, 2011

By 

E.J. Kaye (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver's Seat, The Only Problem (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) (Hardcover)

'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' was a well-written, vivid novella with a great twist at the end. One wonders at the mental status of the author, but the story is pretty gripping. 'The Girls of Slender Means' was also a really fascinating piece of writing, but from there, the collection takes a bit of a dive. The last two stories seem to dwell further into a mania that becomes downright repulsive.

Overall, an interesting set of stories that are worth an extended look.