Word: muriel
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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...
...timorous young Frenchman of a slowly eroding fortune and an over-fond mother meets a young English girl. Anne Brown, visiting Paris. The two become friends, and in time Claude makes a reciprocal visit to the Brown home in Wales. There he gradually, but inevitably, falls in love with Muriel. Anne's younger sister. Romantic adolescent, unsure, Claude proposes marriage. Muriel wavers. Mothers are summoned...
After much discussion, the two agree to separate for a year. Claude returns to Paris, becomes an art dealer and falls out of love. Muriel suffers; time passes. Meanwhile, Anne grows beautiful, becomes an artist in Paris, falls in and out of passionate love with Claude, turns consumptive, dies. Claude writes a novel. Muriel, a thirty-year-old virgin schoolteacher, returns for one last evening with her first and only love who obligingly and summarily deflowers her. One could go on, one needn...
...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...