Word: muriel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...HOTHOUSE BYTHE EAST RIVER by MURIEL SPARK 134 pages. Viking...
...Muriel Spark has posed in a fetching peignoir with a sinister black cat draped over her shoulder. In her prose, too, she has mostly worn her rue with a deference to the reader's need to take his shots of cold mortality with a little sweet vermouth. Lately, however, the author has grown more flatly somber, shorter on style, wit and patience, like a lonely spinster who has become too preoccupied, too saddened by the world to go through the reassuring motions of genial small talk...
...does the reader. "Literature of sentiment and emotion," Muriel Spark recently predicted, "must go. It cheats us into a sense of involvement with life and society." In its place she then proposed an art of "satire and ridicule." Hothouse, presumably, is an example. But precisely because it is lifeless, few people will worry about whatever the book is trying to say. Various possibilities exist. Time past is time present. Late, rich middle age, especially in Manhattan, is a kind of death in life -sterile, futile, hopelessly preoccupied with the past, most depressingly so when earlier years have been marked...
...Even Muriel Spark's set-piece satire is only sporadically rich enough to stir interest, most visibly at a production of Peter Pan staged by Elsa and Paul's homosexual son, in which all the parts are played by people over 60. "It's sick!" members of the audience shout. A collective American voice replies, "Sick is real! Sick is interesting!" Not all that interesting, though. It is far easier in fiction than in life to distinguish the quick from the dead...
...that Truffaut suddenly has nothing to say. Truffaut has never had very much to say. But once he said things well. Here he simply loses all ironic distance and falls list into sentimentality. At one point. Muriel is seen running at twilight over hills and through trees, shouting into the wind in her Welsh-French accent. "Claude, jetadore" while Georges Delerue's weepy score rises to crescendo. It is the sort of scene more expected to spill from the pens of masturbatory adolescents or nineteenth century novelists...