A Two-Line Personal
MALPEDE, KAREN
A Two-Line Personal The Driver's Seat By Muriel Spark Knopf. 177 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Karen Malpede Muriel Spark's 10th novel is slender in all dimensions. Its 117 pages will barely occupy...
...His interrogation by the police ends the novel...
...A young girl in the record section of a department store moves to the rhythm of a just ended rock song "as a newly beheaded chicken continues for a brief time, now squawklessly, its panic career...
...To make his regimen even more stringent: "It has to be a girl...
...Spark is also out of sympathy with these events...
...Meant to enforce a sense of Lise's isolation, these contemporary references rather call attention to the author's own uneasiness with a life style that is not genteel because it is not dominated by a serious aping of upper-class manners...
...But is not Lise also a victim of a life that has been brutal in its uneventfulness, and isn't a violent and painful death the only way she can feel compensated for all the boredom...
...All her novelistic energies are expended upon linking the death to the knowledge that Lise planned it to happen in this manner, at this place, on the first day of her first vacation in three years...
...I'm queer for girls...
...She had a breakdown five years ago...
...The macrobiotic dieter explains his need for a daily orgasm...
...Finally, a recently released mental patient is located who complies with her wishes, adding only the sex act to her careful instructions...
...A novel is never great because it suggests more than is in the text, but because there is so much more in the text than the reader can comfortably absorb...
...Antipathy strikes me as a strange prerequisite for a novelist, though Mrs...
...Lise's action is memorable, even terrifying, but the icy objectivity of the narrative is neither...
...Or was it more satanically noble for Lise to have finally grasped hold of the sensations which escaped her in life by vividly choreographing her own death...
...Spark has used it well in the past--to spike her characterizations of Dame Let-tie Colston in Memento Mori or Selina in The Girls of Slender Means, for example...
...at any rate, the author's imagination has been arrested by the horror of its own creation...
...Spark is a more effective tease than satirist...
...they sit awkwardly on the page...
...It is the extreme selectivity of her vision that makes Muriel Spark a comfortable novelist, not a great one...
...Clearly Lise is not the victim of her attacker...
...As her friend and critic Derek Stanford suggests, Muriel Spark is always more at home with heroines she does not like...
...We can discover, for instance, that she is 34 years old instead of "as young as twenty-five or as old as thirty-six," and that she is probably from Denmark--not England, as we first assume...
...In The Driver's Seat antipathy proves debilitating...
...Spark's avoidance of all except the obvious facts of Lise's last day...
...Still, the characters for whom she displays some sympathy emerge as most interesting: Jean Taylor or Joanna Childes from the same two novels...
...Lise is a woman who no longer connects with the world, no longer holds the slightest concern for the welfare of its occupants...
...Spark has chosen the event most likely to be splashed across the front page of tomorrow's tabloids--the brutal sex murder of a young woman on holiday--and has decided to play it about as big as a two-line personal...
...Its 117 pages will barely occupy two hours of your time and, like the good thriller it is, its memory will slip effortlessly in to fill the tiniest gap in your experience...
...But such sleuthing is ultimately unsatisfying...
...are we supposed to consider her insane...
...So single-minded is this drive that she will not allow herself to be interested in the health-giving diet advocated by a macrobiotic missionary whom she meets on the airplane, or in her elderly shopping companion's inversion of women's liberation ideas (a fear that long hair and colorful clothes foreshadow mens' demands to stay home and chat while women work), or in the student demonstration that causes her to be tear-gassed and trampled...
...Surely he has been vicitimized...
...Why do the reasons behind Lise's incredible plan seem so unimportant to her creator...
...All her attention is directed toward the accomplishment of her death...
...If we are willing to keep comparing passages in the text, we can find out more about Lise than is immediately apparent...
...Always she insists that she doesn't have time for sex...
...Who can tell...
...Was her contrived murder merely sinful...
...Her holiday flight left from Copenhagen, and Danish is one of four languages she speaks (a multilingual Englishwoman would be far more likely to have German as a fourth language...
...remain unexplained...
...Spark's Catholic sensibilities that it precludes any understanding of the reasons behind it...
...Lise's past, her thoughts ("Who knows her thoughts...
...Perhaps Lise's wish to secure her own death is so offensive to Mrs...
...The strict chronological progression of the narrative is repeatedly jarred by descriptions of Lise's mangled body or of journalistic and police reactions to the murder...
...the anguish of the characters is checked by the economy of the style...
...There is something offensively narrow about Mrs...
...She stuffs her passport into the crack in the back seat of a taxi, steals a Fiat from a potential lover, tips a washroom attendant with her key ring, accuses an actual lover of attempted rape and causes him to be jailed...
...This is supposed to be satire, but it simply isn't apt enough...
...She has planned this vacation just to find him, and, as the day progresses and it seems as though he may not be found, her tears are more frequent, her actions more eccentric...
...she lives alone, yet she seems to have family and friends...
...Mrs...
...These suppositions rest on slender evidence: She has had the same job for 16 years...
Vol. 53 • November 1970 • No. 23
