A Whydunnit in Q-Sharp Major

By Martha Duffy

THE DRIVER'S SEAT by Muriel Spark. 117 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

Muriel Spark's tenth novel is a portrait of insanity nearly as stark as madness itself. The heroine is Lise, a 34-year-old spinster who has worked in the same office in a North European city for 16 years. Having bought herself an ugly traveling outfit, she sets out for an unnamed southland ostensibly for a vacation, but really to find someone willing to kill her."

Like much of Spark's writing, The Driver's Seat has some of the elements of a thriller, but there is no real suspense. In fact, the book is like the paperback Lise carries around with her, which she describes as "a whydunnit in q-sharp major." The reader knows that Lise is crazy from the moment she stalks out of a shop because the salesgirl has told her the preposterous garment she wants is "stain-resistant." The fact that she will be stabbed to death is announced portentously on page 25.

Out of Hand. Part of the book's weird fascination lies in the problem of just how she will achieve her goal--after all, even today, murderers do not grow on trees. There is also the relentless Spark humor. In the erratic course of her last day, Lise is befriended by two other freaks who provide the author with a pretext to mock the latest fashions in absurdity. The prize example is a young man named Bill who prattles about Yin and Yang and follows a lunatic regimen that calls for three urinations and one orgasm daily.

Later, Lise meets an ancient Nova Scotian lady who is perhaps the ultimate exponent of Women's Lib. "The male sex is getting out of hand," she says. "Perfume, jewellery, hair down to their shoulders, and I'm not talking about the ones who were born like that. If God had intended them to be as good as us he wouldn't have made them different from us to the naked eye. If we don't look lively, they will be taking over the homes and the children."

The story is built with brisk prose. Little is told about Lise's earlier life, but she hints at the source of her tragedy in the only moment when her resolve wavers: "I want to go back home and feel all that lonely grief again. I miss it so much already." She recovers her imbalance quickly. She has been life's victim long enough. By deciding to die violently, she has achieved the illusion of control over her own fate.

Textbook Psychosis. Muriel Spark has written another riveting small novel that displays her elliptical style and uncanny control of an abruptly shifting narrative. As always, too, she is something of a conundrum. Critics have likened her to writers as varied as Isak Dinesen and Evelyn Waugh. Normally confident commentators grope helplessly to describe the seductions of her stories, citing her wit, her urbanity, her Roman Catholic convictions.

It may be that this time Mrs. Spark herself has succumbed to the powers of her prose. Despite her sheer skill and concision--or perhaps because of them--the book is too schematic. It also seems a rather self-consciously "modern" novel. Though the author's descriptive grasp of madness is frightening, Lise appears to suffer from an almost textbook urban psychosis. She is set about with a clutter of literary devices: the contrast between the repressed North and the chaotic South, the carefully anonymous settings, the intrusive hints that Lise is either like a street whore or a bride on her way to a blood wedding. Lise has, in effect, created and peopled her own demonic world, but the author has externalized it for her rather too efficiently.

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