{"id":3585,"date":"2010-04-06T00:02:07","date_gmt":"2010-04-06T04:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=3585"},"modified":"2016-06-09T14:59:17","modified_gmt":"2016-06-09T18:59:17","slug":"muriel-spark-the-drivers-seat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2010\/04\/06\/muriel-spark-the-drivers-seat\/","title":{"rendered":"Muriel Spark: The Driver’s Seat<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Driver's Seat<\/strong><\/em><\/span>\r\nby Muriel Spark (1970)<\/span>\r\nNew Directions (1994)<\/span>\r\n107 pp<\/span><\/pre>\n
I decided to start my venture into the Lost Booker shortlist with the shortest of the bunch, Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat<\/em>. I could have produced this review as part of my Clock at the Biltmore feature that highlights classic New Yorker <\/em>fiction fortnightly; The Driver’s Seat<\/em> appeared\u00a0in the New Yorker<\/em>‘s pages on May 16, 1970. While I had no idea what I was in for, the violent New Directions cover offered little comfort.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
The only other Spark novel I’d read was The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie<\/em>. However, though there are some slight thematic similarities, The Driver’s Seat<\/em> is not at all what I’d have expected from the writer of The Prime of<\/em> Miss Jean Brodie<\/em>. This one is hellishly dark.<\/p>\n
There are\u00a0several stylistic similarities, though. In both, Spark eschews foreshadowing and, early on, discloses information about the characters’ fates.\u00a0For example, in The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie<\/em> we learn almost at the beginning that:<\/p>\n
Mary Mcgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famour for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire . . .<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Similarly, in The Driver’s Seat<\/em> Spark gives us an unflattering portrait of a character — the central character here — and lets us know that we won’t be with her for too long:<\/p>\n
Lise’s eyes are widely spaced, blue-grey and dull. Her lips are a straight line. She is neither good-looking nor bad-looking. Her nose is short and wider than it will look in the likeness constructed partly by the method of identikit, party by actual photography, soon to be published in the newspapers of four languages.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And, just in case the reader didn’t catch the meaning of that “identikit” (which, incidentally, is the name of the film based on The Driver’s Seat<\/em>, starring Elizabeth Taylor as Lise), Spark doesn’t keep us in the dark for long:<\/p>\n
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 travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Knowing that Lise will be dead the next morning doesn’t offer much light on the story, though.\u00a0We don’t know who will commit the murder.\u00a0Throughout the day Lise will meet several brutal men,\u00a0and we will keep wondering, “Is it him?”\u00a0But even if we did know who the murderer was early on,\u00a0we would still have no idea why. And that is the crux of this story: why does this woman end up dead the next morning?<\/p>\n
So we know the story won’t end happily. But, the story doesn’t begin happily either. Lise is going on a holiday, and she’s trying to find the perfect dress. Just when she thinks she’s found one, the sales clerk tells her it is made of that new stain-resistant material.\u00a0Lise freaks out, giving us our first clue early on that Lisa is just not a stable person. This is not a comical scene, either; it’s uncomfortable to read. Spark has us in her control immediately, and her confidence is apparent without getting in the way.<\/p>\n
Finally,\u00a0Lise does find an awful dress she likes and goes to the airport.\u00a0She keeps telling people that she’s going on holiday and that her boyfriend is waiting for her at the other end. However, we get the sense that she doesn’t know who this man is yet, only that she will know him when she sees him. And, just as in The Prime of<\/em> Miss Jean\u00a0Brodie<\/em> we get Jean’s common refrain “I am in my prime” whenever she defends herself,\u00a0in The Driver’s Seat<\/em> we get “he’s not my type” with almost everyone Lise meets.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
The chapter on the airplane is strange.\u00a0 Honestly, throughout the novel I felt I was reading something by Roberto Bola\u00f1o. People just kept doing strange things for no apparent reason.\u00a0It’s unsettling. It’s also at this point when we meet,\u00a0Bill,\u00a0one of the most unsettling characters in the novel:<\/p>\n
Lise’s left-hand neighbor smiles. The loudspeaker tells the passengers to fasten their seat-belts and refrain from smoking. Her admirer’s brown eyes are warm, his smile, as wide as his forehead, seems to take up most of his lean face.\u00a0Lise says, audibly above the other voices on the plan, ‘You look like Red Riding-Hood’s grandmother. Do you want to eat me up?’<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
If you’ve seen the Elizabeth Taylor film, then you cannot get this image out of your mind.\u00a0Bill is just creepy as he stares, almost salivating, at Lise.\u00a0He’s on a macrobiotic diet, always eschewing Yin for Yang. On his diet he is required to have one orgasm per day. He will pester Lise through much of the book. If he doesn’t, he has to make up for it the next. And it gets stranger:<\/p>\n
The engines rev up. Her ardent neighbour’s widened lips give out a deep, satisfied laughter, while he slaps her knee in applause. Suddenly her other neighbour looks at Lise in alarm. He stares, as if recognizing her, with his brief-case on his lap, an dhis hand in the position of pulling out a batch of papers. Something about Lise, about her exchange with the man on her left, has casued a kind of paralysis in his act of fetching out some papers from his brief-case. He opesn his mouth, gasping and startled, staring at her as if she is someone he has known and forgotten and now sees again. She smiles at him; it is a smile of relief and delight. His hand moves again, hurriedly putting back the papers that he had half-drawn out of his brief-case. He trembles as he unfastens his seat-belt and makes as if to leave his seat, grabbing his brief-case.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Throughout the book, Spark has her characters flashforward a day, and we see them answering questions about Lise for police reports. Here’s what the man who abandoned his seat says:<\/p>\n
On the evening of the following day he will tell the police quite truthfully, ‘The first time I saw her was at the airport.\u00a0Then on the plane. She sat beside me.’<\/span><\/p>\n
‘You never saw her before at any time? You didn’t know her?’<\/span><\/p>\n
‘No, never.’<\/span><\/p>\n
‘What was your conversation on the plane?’<\/span><\/p>\n
‘Nothing.\u00a0I moved my seat.\u00a0I was afraid.’<\/span><\/p>\n
‘Afraid?’<\/span><\/p>\n
‘Yes, frightened. I moved to another seat, away from her.’<\/span><\/p>\n
‘What frightened you?’<\/span><\/p>\n
‘I don’t know.’<\/span><\/p>\n
‘Why did you move your seat at that time?’<\/span><\/p>\n
‘I don’t know.\u00a0I must have sensed somehting.’<\/span><\/p>\n
‘What did she say to you?’<\/span><\/p>\n
‘Nothing much. She got her seat-belt mixed with mine. Then she was carrying on a bit with the man at the end seat.’<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Unlike a Bola\u00f1o novel, however, this one does begin to resolve itself, and we begin to connect the dots in the narrative. Ultimately, it is a sad novel displaying emptiness.\u00a0And, in one final effort to compare this one to The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie<\/em>: I think The Driver’s Seat<\/em> is better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Trevor reviews Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat<\/em>. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3584,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[800,90,94],"tags":[954,882,1010,969],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-3585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-muriel-spark","category-new-yorker-fiction","tag-954","tag-1970s","tag-classic-new-yorker-fiction","tag-new-directions"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/The-Drivers-Seat.jpg?fit=361%2C530&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-VP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3585"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18552,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3585\/revisions\/18552"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3585"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}