Norman Mailer dismissed
Muriel Spark’s writing as belonging to what he called "dykily psychotic,
crippled, creepish" women's writing. The man had his problems.
Spark is
perhaps now best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and most likely because that was made into a successful
movie, starring the young Maggie Smith. Spark herself had attended James Gillespie's
High School in Edinburgh (from 1923 to 1935) which was the model for the Marcia
Blaine School in the novel.
The Only Problem was published in 1984 and drew
my attention because its main character, Harvey, was trying as I am to
understand the Book of Job. He and another character had discussed this Book
since they were fellow students in university and agreed that it was the most
important part of the Bible, that the problem it presents—why suffering is
visited upon a man who has been pronounced righteous—is pivotal, is in fact
“the only problem.”
The two men are married to
sisters and matters do get complicated. Both marriages fail, though in very different
ways. Harvey left his wife after she had shop-lifted two bars of chocolate and
defended this action by arguing that stealing from big corporations that
exploit their customers was acceptable. Her sister agreed with Harvey that
stealing only makes it worse for everyone, besides which, “it’s dishonest.” The
wife, however, continues in her wayward ways, contributing to a surrealistic
drama involving the French police.
Meanwhile the sister
leaves her husband and winds up with Harvey, though this is not as simple as it
sounds. “Her being there … astonished her to the point of vertigo.” Harvey is independently
wealthy and lives in France near the painting shown above of Job’s wife
visiting her distressed husband. The painting is by Georges de la Tour,
possibly done in 1625. Harvey visits it for inspiration from time to time. He
is convinced that Job continued to suffer even after his health and wealth have
been restored for “he [Job] not only argued the problem of suffering, he
suffered the problem of argument. And that is incurable.” Ultimately, he
[Harvey] finds “We are back to the Inscrutable. If the answers are valid, then
it is the questions that are all cock-eyed.”
In an obituary that
appeared in The Weekly Standard, May 1, 2006, Kelly Jane Torrance wrote:
"The world has lost a singular voice with the death of Dame Muriel. Her
short, sharp novels … have something of the biting wit of Evelyn Waugh and the
intellectual Catholicism of Graham Greene; but in her ability to make the
absurd seem everyday, and the darkest deeds deliciously droll, Spark was in a
class of her own.”
The image of Georges de la Tour' painting was downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.
