Review: Anthony Domestico on Muriel Spark

A disordered perfectionist

Muriel Spark wasn’t a perfect person. She once wrote of Marie Stopes, a contraceptive advocate with whom she battled while serving as general secretary of the Poetry Society, “I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control.” But Spark did write a handful of perfect books. Memento Mori(1959), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Loitering with Intent (1981), A Far Cry from Kensington(1988): one wouldn’t want a single word altered in any of them. Each is short (the longest, Memento Mori, is under 250 pages); perhaps perfection is achievable in, or at least more easily ascribed to, tight rather than loose novels

Read Anthony Domestico in Book Post on Sigrid Nunez, Joseph O’Neill, Marilynne Robinson, Susan Choi, Louise Glück, Rachel Cusk, Yiyun Li, and Gary Snyder, among others.

For Spark, everything depended upon concision. Born Muriel Camberg in Edinburgh in 1918 to a Jewish father and an English mother, she wanted to become a poet before she became a novelist. After graduating from high school, she took a course on précis writing because she “love[d] economical prose, and would always try to find the briefest way to express a meaning.” Spark declared in an interview that she wrote “minor novels deliberately.” In describing her novels as minor, she partly was alluding to their slimness. (And Spark knew slimness. In 1954, shortly before she wrote her first novel, The Comforters, and converted to Catholicism, she came to believe that T. S. Eliot was communicating with her through his play The Confidential Clerk—a hallucination brought on by her consumption of diet pills. In A Far Cry from Kensington, a character tartly observes that losing weight is simple: “You eat and drink the same as always, only half.”)