"now, let's be lucid"
Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat, from 1970, is 5.2 x 8 x 0.3 inches & a terrifying 88 pages.
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Oh, this book scared me so much! Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat opens with a studiously nondescript woman named Lise, shopping for an upcoming trip and having an absolute meltdown in a department store because a clerk notes that the dress she’s about to buy has strain-resistant fabric.
From the jump, there’s a feeling of the most intense agitation. Reading this book is like being stuck right next to a very stressful stranger for an unknown duration. You need to leave their orbit immediately, but you can’t. And Lise is a stranger the whole time— I’ve said it before, I’ve said it again—this is one of the great tricks that slender novels can really pull off.
Lise makes me so nervous. Almost everyone Lise meets makes me so nervous. She wears garish, psychedelic clothes that no one can bear to look at. One person who sits next to her on the plane, leaps up during the FASTEN-SEATBELTS portion of the flight, because he just can’t bear to be next to her. But even he can’t avoid the gravitational pull of disastrous uneasiness. The other person Lise sits next to is a self-described Enlightenment Leader of the Macrobiotic movement, who is smuggling what may or may not be rice.
It’s a sinister book, about unglued characters. It’s also got this wild pacing—it’s moving briskly, but everything seems to happening in slow motion. It indicates it’s going to be a story about who is in control and then, just to let you know, it says: no one is in control ever and does a creepy laugh.
In conclusion: I think The Driver’s Seat might be a parable about the dangers of sitting next to anyone at all on an airplane, or simply interacting with strangers, which is inevitable and unavoidable, which is what is ultimately so scary.
The Driver’s Seat was also the November installment of Purse Book Gals-On-The-Go Official Book Club Book. Here’s what a few Gals on the Go thought:
“Brits really are so upset when people mistake them for Americans when they’re traveling.” - Allie
“I bet that her psychedelic clothes were really fun/I wonder if she was the grown ‘Portia from White Lotus’ character actually.” - Mac
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