“come & do a somersault”
Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, from 1961, is 7 x 5 x 0.5 inches & 137 pages.
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Goodbye to Muriel Spark month! The other three installments, The Finishing School (a filthy lunch), The Public Image (the quiet twist), The Driver’s Seat (now let’s be lucid) are all linked.
Is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie the funniest book I’ve ever read? Well, I don’t know, because I don’t rank things in such a crass way. But maybe it is—because it’s got jokes and premise and also it knocks the air out of you at the end, which feels terrible but that means the joke’s on us too.
But I don’t need to tell you all this: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is famously the best. So I’ll just focus on the concept of one’s prime. According to the testament of Miss Jean Brodie, one’s prime is “the moment one was born for.” It’s the time for action, it’s the time when it’s imperative to live life fully.
In college, we had a conceit that’s adjacent to prime, big among my friends: it was called full age. Every person has a full age and it’s almost never the age they are, because it only happens once. It’s self-determined, it doesn’t just happen to you. It’s the age when what’s expected of you matches exactly to your natural demeanor. Among my housemates senior year, when we were about 21, there was: one 10-year-old, one 43-year-old, one 70-year-old, two 33-year-olds. Clashes could be understood in terms of full age.
Anyway declaring one’s prime is dangerous and delusional and leads to nonsense—which is the whole thing in this novel— while understanding one’s full age is practically self-actualization and my friends had it right, as usual. But it’s so boring to be self-actualized, there’s no plot there, where one’s prime is allll plot, for better for worse, and it makes a perfect perfect slim slim novel.
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