It's
always nice to have someone read to you, especially when it's a
writer you admire. The special treat of The New Yorker:Fiction
podcast is that the reader, a New Yorker fiction writer, chooses a
story that was published in the magazine and that he or she
particularly admires. After the reading, the writer and fiction
editor Deborah Treisman discuss the story and its author. Sometimes I
know the author well; I may even remember having read the story. But
at other times it's a revelation.
That's
what happened in January when Joseph O'Neill, who wrote the wonderful novel
Netherland,
read Muriel Spark's short story “The Ormolu Clock”,
originally published in the New Yorker in 1960. The story was
terrific and O'Neill's admiration for her technique and her
'nastiness' made me enjoy it even more. Spark is best known for “The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”, but I wanted to try one of her less
known works, so I settled on The Girls of Slender Means.
The
'girls' are living in London in the spring of 1945 in an Edwardian
mansion called the May of Teck Club, which “exists for the
Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender
Means”. Somehow Spark manages to make this large cast of women of
different ages, experience and ambitions into fully realized
characters, as they were in 1945 and as they are when she revisits
them many years later. In the early chapters the tone is light and
droll, as when she describes one resident: “she lolled in the
distinct attitude of being the only woman present who could afford to
loll”. But she subtly weaves a darker thread into the story, and a
tragedy ultimately colors many of their lives.
I'm
not sure I liked this book as much as I liked the short story on the
podcast, but may that's because I like being read to by an Irishman.
