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estate (she died four years ago) is swelling by the day. What’s the flaw in this business plan? There isn’t one.
    My only caveat is that your short novels have to be really, really good—that’s the motor for the whole thing. (If you’re going to write bad short books, then forget it—you’d be better off writing one bad long one.) The Driver’s Seat , which is pitched straight into the long grass somewhere between Patricia Highsmith and early Pinter, is a creepy and unsettling novella about a woman who travels from Britain to an unnamed European city, apparently because she is hell-bent on getting herself murdered. I couldn’t really tell you why Spark felt compelled to write it, but understanding the creative instinct isn’t a prerequisite for admiring a work of art, and its icy strangeness is part of its charm. A Far Cry from Kensington came later but is set earlier, in a West London boardinghouse whose inhabitants are drawn toward each other in strange ways when one of them, an editor at a publishing house, is rude to a talentless hack. (She calls him a “ pisseur de copie ,” an insult that isrepeated gleefully and satisfyingly throughout the book. Spark is fond of strange, funny mantras.) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is her most famous novel, at least here, where the movie, starring Maggie Smith as an overbearing and eccentric teacher in a refined Scottish girls’ school, is one of our national cinematic treasures. I probably enjoyed this last one the least of the three—partly because I’d seen the film, partly because Miss Brodie is such a brilliantly realized archetype that I felt I’d already come across several less-successful versions of her. (Influential books are often a disappointment, if they’re properly influential, because influence cannot guarantee the quality of the imitators, and your appetite for the original has been partially sated by its poor copies.) But what a writer Spark is—dry, odd, funny, aphoristic, wise, technically brilliant. I can’t remember the last time I read a book by a well-established writer previously unknown to me that resulted in me devouring an entire oeuvre—but that only brings me back to the subject of short books, their beauty and charm and efficacy. A Far Cry from Kensington weighs in at a whopping 208 pages, but the rest are all around the 150 mark. You want your oeuvre devoured? Look and learn.
    At the end of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , one of Miss Brodie’s girls, now all grown up, visits another, and attempts to tell her about her troubled marriage. “‘I’m not much good at that sort of problem,’ said Sandy. But Monica had not thought she would be able to help much, for she knew Sandy of old, and persons known of old can never be much help.” Which sort of brings us full circle.
    In next month’s exciting episode, I will describe an attempt, not yet begun, to read Our Mutual Friend on a very modern ebook machine thing. It’s the future. Monday, in fact, probably, once more Spark oeuvre has been devoured.

SEPTEMBER 2010
BOOKS BOUGHT:
    Our Mutual Friend —Charles Dickens
    Brooklyn: Historically Speaking —John B. Manbeck
    BOOKS DOWNLOADED FOR NOTHING:
    Our Mutual Friend —Charles Dickens
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn —Mark Twain
    Babbitt— Sinclair Lewis
BOOKS READ:
    Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live—Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller
    Brooklyn —Colm Tóibín
    The Girls of Slender Means— Muriel Spark
    The Given Day —Dennis Lehane (half)
    Loitering With Intent —Muriel Spark (half)
    The Finishing School —Muriel Spark (half)
    Tinkers —Paul Harding (one-third)
    F our years ago to the very month, as I’m sure you will remember, this column daringly introduced a Scientist of the Month award. The first winner was Matthias Wittlinger, of the University of Ulm,