Welcome to Purse Book, a weekly newsletter about reading hot little books & being a gal on the go. And welcome to Muriel Spark month!! Four slender little novels in a row, by only one person!
The finishing school in question in The Finishing School is a small itinerant program, in Switzerland at the time of action. An entertaining parade of rich kids come to the Finishing School after high school, before the next phase of their lives whether that be marriage, inheritance, or rehabilitating the disgraced family image. The school is run by a couple: Nina and Rowland. Nina teaches lessons in looking and being rich (comme il faut), Rowland happens to be absolutely strung out on envy over his talented pupil.
One of Spark’s main interests as a novelist—the education and miseducation of youth—focuses on the curse of jealousy in this novel. When I realized this while reading, I realized that envy is the most boring of the sins, though I liked Amadeus a lot. But just as I’m being superior about thinking this, Spark explains why jealousy is so boring, so well:
There are other, classic, little Sparkian pleasures in this book. There’s a misplaced Princess, a smuggled el Greco of questionable veracity that’s hidden in the hothouse (“very bad for paint”) and phrases that are unexplained but make perfect sense to me and which I used just last week to describe an eleven a.m. feast:
And finally, importantly, I will leave us with a crucial lesson from the comme il faut classes:
If you haven’t already, you absolutely may subscribe now: