Dear readers, A co-worker recently accused me of spoiling several movie plotlines for him, for which I was properly mortified. (Forgive me, Neima! I’m a chatty recapper.) People who do that on purpose belong with the lawless hooligans who turn to the last page of a novel first, or tell you about your surprise party because “I thought you’d want to know.” So I will do my best not to give away too much about the two books in this week’s newsletter, neither of which shorts on portent or revelation — except to say that there is some literary hooliganism at work here too, in the ingenious and slightly diabolical ways that each one aims to subvert the traditional forms of storytelling, if not turn them inside out entirely. One begins with an ending; the other loops like a Möbius strip. Both scrambled my brain like a little egg, delightfully. —Leah “The Driver’s Seat,” by Muriel SparkFiction, 1970
When we first meet Lise, the tetchy office-manager protagonist of Sparks’s novella, she is in a department store, zipping herself into a brightly patterned shift for an upcoming trip, when a shopgirl, eager to lock in the sale, tells her that the garment is made of “specially treated fabric. … If you spill like a drop of sherry you just wipe it off.” “Get this thing off me. Off me, at once,” Lise shrieks like a bizarro-world Lady Macbeth. “Who asked you for a stain-resistant dress?” Can it be that this odd bird actually welcomes dirt and disorder? Does she want to mark the spot? We know by Page 21 that she’ll be found stabbed to death the morning after next, “her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is traveling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.” So begins a metaphysical thriller in which the outcome is a known quantity, the “victim” is seemingly the architect of her own violent demise and a series of strange interactions and events are left to dangle and shiver in the ill-wind breeze, inscrutably. Lise’s journey to an unnamed southern European city has the quality of a lucid dream or a David Lynch movie (in fact it was made into an Italian film in 1974, starring an imperious Elizabeth Taylor). She appears to be continually searching for something or someone and coming away obscurely disappointed: “I don’t think you’re my type after all,” she says more than once — to her airplane seatmate, to a would-be macrobiotic guru in beige corduroys and to a burly mechanic named Carlo, among other nonplused men. Is she sussing out a vacation boyfriend or casting her killer? Spark, who died two decades ago at age 88 (most likely of natural causes, an end she no doubt found hopelessly pedestrian) revels in the ambiguity of her premise. But the author of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” has a particular gift for difficult waspish women and their murky psychologies. “The Driver’s Seat” is a disorienting little night terror of a novella, a cracked mirror that refracts ugly truths even (or especially) in the dark. Read if you like: Polyester blends, tear gas, not having an emergency contact. “Time’s Arrow,” by Martin AmisFiction, 1991
I first read “Time’s Arrow” under my desk during an endless comparative religion seminar in college, and it seems slightly insane to me now that I passed the class. Amis’s seventh novel, in addition to being as syntactically dense and razzle-dazzle as anything he’s written, is constructed like a sports car with only one workable gear: reverse. We open on the presumed final moments of a protagonist we will come to know by several names — a surgeon, a ladies’ man and seemingly a bit of a loner, as witnessed by the disembodied narrator living inside but apart from him who is as awed as he is bemused by this backward world he’s been conscripted to observe. In the beginning (or “beginning”), the good doctor, aging and adrift in the bland prosperity of Reagan-era America, seems like a pitiable figure, a schlumpy senior reading bottom-feeder tabloids and struggling to move his bowels with dignity. But as the years begin to whiz, so does he: seducing pliable nurses, gallantly saving lives in the operating room, wearing flared pants. Soon, there are sexy new cities and identities too. All of this unfurls in perfect film-speed inverse, as if it were a VHS tape played clean on rewind: “A child’s breathless wailing calmed by the firm slap of the father’s hand, a dead ant revived by the careless press of a passing sole, a wounded finger healed and sealed by the knife’s blade.” As the doctor grows more vigorous, grimmer glints of his back story begin to emerge. This is the part where I don’t ruin everything for you, though the first page of Google results for the book is more than happy to; if you’ve read some other Amis though, you might have a clue what monstrous 20th-century event we’re marching toward. “Time’s Arrow” is as much a literary flex as it is a novel, and in later readings I found myself getting annoyingly didactic about the way it sometimes bends the rules. (Shouldn’t the actual words in spoken dialogue be reversed, not the flow of sentences? Probably, shut up.) But with apologies to my religion professor, I’ve forgotten almost everything I know about Sufism, and I still think about this book a lot. Read if you like: Scalpels, fugitives, the reverse war-movie bit in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Friendly reminder: Check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online. Like this email? Sign-up here or forward it to your friends. Have a suggestion or two on how we can improve it? Let us know at books@nytimes.com. Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
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