The Driver's Seat

Like, there are very, uh, there are a few books that really stay with you.

Um, you know, y- Muriel Spark, uh, The Driver's Seat has always stayed with me-

Mm

... which you introduced me to, Gray.

Um, I guess in another, you know, upcoming read for me, I know you're not doing this project necessarily, but, um, the, the next book in my Muriel Spark read-a-thon is going to be, uh, one of my favorites of the past.

It's a reread of "The Driver's Seat."

Oh, cool.

We'll be entering the 1970s with Muriel Spark.

This is gonna be book 10 for October.

We, you know, one book every month, um, until we're done at 22 books.

This is book 10, "The Public"... or not "The Public Image," "The Driver's Seat." We just finished "The Public Image," which was also a reread for me, and probably was my least favorite of her books when I first read it.

I loved it this time.

Uh, why should we assume that a character made up of words on a page has a direct connection, uh, to a human being? Why should we think that we should know, uh, what a character is in a novel just because we're told a lot of things about her? The French nouveau romancier, that's to say French postmodern avant-garde, uh, writers like Nathalie Sarraute, um, were quite interested in Muriel Spark, as it turns out, in the 1960s, um, because they detected, I think, amidst a kind of solid British, uh, post-war realism, think, say, Kingsley Amis, they detected in Spark, uh, someone who was more interesting and radical and, uh, self-reflective about the processes of writing, uh, than her peers.

Indeed, she famously, uh, wrote a, a, a frankly postmodern and self-reflective, uh, novel called The Driver's Seat in 1970, which as the, as the, um, title might, uh, give away, it meditates quite deeply on questions of au- sort of authorial omniscience and control and so on.

Anyway, this is all quite boring, and the one thing I don't want to be is boring about this absolutely brilliant, funny novel that means so much to me.

So let's get to the, the basics.