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Title: The Driver's Seat (The New Directions Bibelots) by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0-8112-1271-8 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 May, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: "I knew you were the one."
Comment: In Muriel Spark's chilling novella "The Driver's Seat" Lise, the protagonist, is a 34 year old spinster. Lise works in the accounting department of a firm in an unidentified Northern European country. When the story begins, Lise has the afternoon off from her job. In fact, after Lise creates a scene, her frightened employer tells her "you need a good holiday," and he timidly insists that Lise leave immediately. Lise spends the afternoon preparing for a trip--but there's something odd about her preparations. While buying an incredibly garish outfit, she explodes into rage. And when she's packed and at the airport, Lise's behaviour continues to be extremely bizarre. She tells complete strangers that she's off to meet her boyfriend. Her manner betrays a certain recklessness--combined with an edge of hysteria, and most people give her odd looks and veer off as quickly as possible.
Lise is plainly unattached, but she's obviously looking for someone. Lise eyes all the men who come within a few feet, and frightens some while another remains glued to her side. Once Lise arrives at her destination, she immediately begins searching for 'her boyfriend' on the streets and in the shops. She bumps into an old lady, Mrs. Fiedke, and the two embark on a shopping spree. Mrs. Fiedke's "eyesight is sufficiently dim, her hearing faint enough" for most of Lise's bizarre behaviour to remain unnoticed.
Just who is Lise's mystery man? Lise declares "the torment of it" is "not knowing exactly where and when he's going to turn up." She says she'll know him when she sees him, and every man she sees is potentially 'the one.'
Muriel Spark's novella is very tightly written, perfectly paced and constructed, and tension builds as the story develops. Lise is a marvelously well-drawn character, and some of the best scenes occur when she acts out in a normal situation. At the very beginning of the story, Lise tries on a dress in a shop, and then explodes into petty, hysterical behavior. The poor shop assistant is dumbfounded by Lise's irrational behaviour, and yet Lise leaves the shop "with a look of satisfaction at her own dominance over the situation." This scene will stay with me forever. Spark's novels tend to deal with people who are a little peculiar. "The Driver's Seat" is the darkest book by Spark I've read, and I enjoyed it immensely--displacedhuman.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Art of Sensual Massacre
Comment: The bleakest of Muriel Spark's twenty one novels, 1971's The Driver's Seat provides its audience with a short, harrowing ride, one often without apparent course or destination. Written in uncomfortable second person present tense, the reader becomes an immediate and hesitating witness to the last days in the life of Lise, the book's erratic, exacting, and strangely confrontational anti - heroine. The Driver's Seat is, among other things, a piercing indictment of both the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of Western sixties culture and the radical break with traditional that the decade represented. Spark pulls off a clever literary coup in the opening paragraph of the third chapter, when she casually reveals the novel's catastrophic ending. By defusing the book's forward motion and the reader's expectations of reaching a climax in the routine manner, Spark forces the reader to look away from the narrative to understand the book's theme and meaning.
Lise, 34, is a product of scrubbed clean and prepackaged modern society, and is or has become a kind of tight - lipped clockwork cog blandly caught in the dull hierarchical social and economic machinery of life. Emotionally sterile and spiritually vacant, only the briefest glimpses into the inner workings of Lise's mind are made available. However, Lise, who habitually erupts into unprovoked barking laughter, has had "years of illness" of the psychological kind, the results of which have left her office coworkers quietly terrified of her presence. Lise is a walking pathology, a brittle death's head effigy who is likely to collapse or collapse a building at any moment should her precarious self regulating control system fail. Lise is a shark fin cutting the surface of life, a breathing but not necessarily living crash test dummy, a combustible wax work 'other' lacking a genuine human presence and an authentic resemblance to mankind. Spark hilariously underscores Lise's tragic monstrousness by giving her the Bride of Frankenstein's hairstyle, skunk stripe rising up from middlebrow to high pile above.
Subtly coerced by her coworkers to take a vacation, Lise already has extensive plans to do so. She will travel by plane from her own northern country (probably Sweden) to a southern country (most likely Italy), leaving behind her modern pine walled apartment, which has been constructed so that all furniture and appliances fold smoothly away into the walls (even the toilet). Lise keeps the few visible household trappings perfectly ordered and devoid of personal touches, leaving the apartment like a hotel room in a perpetual state of readiness for the next guest. Lise's home is her 'pine box.'
Only elderly, sweet natured, and met - along - the way traveling companion Mrs. Fiedke, who can neither see nor hear properly, can stomach Lise's company as Lise searches endlessly for a "boyfriend" she is unable to recognize or describe. In an effort to assist, Mrs. Fiedke asks, "Will you feel a presence? Is that how you'll know?" "Not really a presence," Lise famously replies, "the lack of an absence, that's what it is." Strangely, Lise becomes briefly more human as the narrative winds to a close; she momentarily regrets the plan she has precipitated, even while there is still more than enough time to bring it to a halt. She misses "the lonely grief" of home, and offhandedly says, "I wished my parents had practiced birth control." Readers will find Lise's brief manifestation of humanity starkly poignant.
By revealing that Lise's present condition has been partially caused by her being "neither pretty or ugly," and her continuing isolation due to her intrinsic status as a nondescript person in a world of mediocre, bland, and unremarkable people, Spark underscores the process by which some individuals perpetually overlooked as 'ordinary' can become extraordinary deviant and dangerous. Encouraging already indistinct members of society to assume generic personalities and rigid, conformist lifestyles, Spark seems to be saying, doesn't force the evolution of the New Man, but causes permanent spiritual deformities and creates abominations.
The Driver's Seat is filled with eccentric characters, but unlike other Spark novels, there are no outright sinister eccentrics other than Lise. The Driver's Seat equates evil with processed sterility and blankness rather than with the more traditional concepts of Christian sin and violation of grace and virtue. Here, vacuous stupidity (when Lise and Mrs. Fiedke are surrounded by cavorting hippies, shrewd Mrs. Fiedke says, "They are hermaphrodites. It isn't their fault"), solipsism, witless opinion, groundless protest, and trendy hedonism are merely the new norm, the to - be expected detritus of newly destabilized Western life. Even meek Mrs. Fiedke, representing the decaying old guard, believes all "homosexuals should be put on an island" and doesn't hesitate to say so. In the Driver's Seat, both civilization and nature, both the old order and the new, are at a dead end.
In an absurd world, can a person seize complete control of his or her destiny? If so, to what degree, and to how many possible outcomes? Can man successfully usurp God's role? These are the questions Spark raises and unsettlingly addresses here.
A story of a woman in search of the perfect man, and of two people perfectly suited for one another finally meeting, The Driver's Seat turns every fairytale and romantic notion painfully upon its head. Upon finishing the book, Spark landed in the hospital, apparently suffering nervous strain and exhaustion, which gives potential readers a hint of its macabre power. Highly recommended.
Rating: 5
Summary: Is this Spark's most disturbing metafiction
Comment: From the start of this story it is clear that the protagonist - Lise (pronounced Lees, or Lies?) - is living in a fantasy.
The foreshadowing, sometimes subtle sometimes obvious, allows Spark to play around with the genres of the thriller, the detective story and the holiday romance. But it is in the self-consciously deliberate way that Muriel Spark at the same time obscures and reveals Lise to us that the genius of the author is demonstrated.
It's not a happy holiday read, it is an addictive and provocative story, told with considerable narrative skill.
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Title: Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0811214745 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: June, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Memento Mori by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0811214389 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: June, 2000 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: The Abbess of Crewe: A Modern Morality Tale by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0811212963 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 May, 1995 List Price(USD): $7.00 |
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Title: The Comforters (REVIVED MODERN CLASSIC) by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0811212858 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 September, 1994 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark ISBN: 081121379X Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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