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A review by deerfangs
Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark
3.0
This was an odd one, worth reading but frustrating at times. I really enjoyed the prose and dialogue, and some, though not all, of the reflections on writing were resonant. The characters were drawn very vividly, though not with very much depth. Fleur as an unreliable narrator was generally a fun perspective to occupy. I also got a strong sense of the environment of postwar London and I was amused by the lighthearted skewering of class dynamics and witty descriptions of everyday minutiae.
It lost me when it got to the point of Sir Quentin forming a literal religious cult and Fleur's novel being referenced heavily. I like the argument Spark seems to be making about the mutually deterministic relationship between texts and reality, and the novel within a novel is clever as a plot device in service of that argument, but despite its cleverness it's very dull to read Fleur's thoughts about characters and plot points from a nonexistent book that we are barely told anything about. If the Autobiographical Association people weren't just caricatures, and if Warrender Chase were actually explained as a story on its own terms, the emergence of the parallels between the two might seem more significant. As it is, the reader is just repeatedly beaten over the head with Fleur's belief that there are parallels, but neither side is given clear enough form for that to mean anything.
There's also an odd amount of repetition of certain phrases that make the book feel like an unfinished draft. At one point, "I had finished the book in January 1950" is followed by "it was the end of January 1950 that I began to notice a deterioration in the members of the Association"... and then nearly identical phrasing less than five pages later, "I noticed the deterioration in the members of the Autobiographical Association precisely at the end of January 1950, a week after I had finished the book"... Overall, not terrible by any means, but underbaked.
It lost me when it got to the point of Sir Quentin forming a literal religious cult and Fleur's novel being referenced heavily. I like the argument Spark seems to be making about the mutually deterministic relationship between texts and reality, and the novel within a novel is clever as a plot device in service of that argument, but despite its cleverness it's very dull to read Fleur's thoughts about characters and plot points from a nonexistent book that we are barely told anything about. If the Autobiographical Association people weren't just caricatures, and if Warrender Chase were actually explained as a story on its own terms, the emergence of the parallels between the two might seem more significant. As it is, the reader is just repeatedly beaten over the head with Fleur's belief that there are parallels, but neither side is given clear enough form for that to mean anything.
There's also an odd amount of repetition of certain phrases that make the book feel like an unfinished draft. At one point, "I had finished the book in January 1950" is followed by "it was the end of January 1950 that I began to notice a deterioration in the members of the Association"... and then nearly identical phrasing less than five pages later, "I noticed the deterioration in the members of the Autobiographical Association precisely at the end of January 1950, a week after I had finished the book"... Overall, not terrible by any means, but underbaked.