The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

(Rowland is advised to cure himself by checking in to a local monastery named St. Rowland is consumed by jealousy of Chris's talent, and Spark's very short novel-short novella, even-charts the growth of that envy as it burgeons almost to madness.

His wife, Nina, exasperatedly asks him one day, 'Don't you feel you're one of those people who can get by without writing a novel?' Alas, he, too, is an aspiring writer, but thoroughly arrested where Chris is fertile. The school's owner and principal, the twenty-nine-year-old Rowland Mahler, teaches creative writing and has read some of Chris's bewilderingly talented book.

One attractive boy, Chris, seems to be a prodigiously gifted writer, a mere seventeen-year-old who is already at work on a historical novel. In a Swiss finishing school run on distinctly liberal lines are gathered nine pupils, most of them girls. Her new novel, The Finishing School, satirically assails, among other things, the culture of spectacle that has grown up around novel-writing, and in particular around novel-writing by attractive young people. Nevertheless, it feels long enough, and perhaps Muriel Spark, now in her eighties, fears that she will not outlive it.

Johnson defined Grub Street as a place inhabited by hacks and writers of 'temporary poems,' and of course publishing's current superficiality will not last. In a world in which one can still be a 'younger writer' at forty, to be twenty-five and a published author-or, better still, nineteen-is to be indeed a mere chick or lad, loaded with metropolitan gold. The ideal title might be Dumpbin, because the quality of most of these books is almost beside the point they exist as easy windows onto their authors, who have found themselves in print largely because they are so young, and whose promising juvenility represents the real raison d'être of the publishing event. Naipaul as now resembling 'toyshops'-without being assailed by a dictator-size poster of some bullet-headed pugilist, his lips pursed in a macho moue, the apparently unhappy author of a novel whose title is invariably a punchy single word, such as Porno. It is hard to enter any London bookstores-memorably disdained by V. If American fiction has been swarmed over recently by so-called chicklit, British writing has been dominated by its tougher sibling, ladlit.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark