Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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."

'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.

Greek poetry used epithets to pad out line metre, I remember being taught. Spark uses them to mark character. Small-eyed Sandy; stupid Mary; over and over the words are thrown up to the reader, at the oddest and least expected times. Those words inhere in Mary and Sandy, one feels. Even on a happy day, in a garden full of light, the stupidity, the pig-eyed squint. They cannot escape, even among the flowers, being what they are. The non-sequence of narration, too, makes inevitability clear: Along the gravel paths in the happy sun, the sordid death ten years later. Greek, that; Greek the foredoom, Greek the hubris and the seeing through that same hubris, through the illusion that Miss Jean Brodie ever had a prime. A novel about Fate, then, and a magnificent one.

I was sent a different edition than the one I bought. Products should only be sold on the pages of the particular edition they represent.