3. The Driver's Seat

By Muriel Spark

The 1974 film, Identikit, had been on my watch list for some time with this intriguing description: "Liz Taylor as suicidal spinster; hard to find." 

 

I was sure I'd first learned of the film via Kier-La Janisse's House of Psychotic Women, but couldn't find any reference to either 'Identikit' nor 'The Driver's Seat' in the index -- only Secret Ceremony was cited in reference to Elizabeth Taylor (apparently Severin's House of Psychotic Women collection, an unusual DVD box set based on the book, features Identikit).

 

Last October, I finally watched Identikit, about “a flamboyantly dressed Englishwoman cutting a swath through Italy - tourism as exhibitionism, self-destruction as self-actualization.”  I believe it was due to Janisse's efforts that Identikit has been made available on various streaming services, like Prime and Shudder (I streamed it on Tubi). Still not sure whether I actually liked this unsettling film, but I certainly appreciated it as an unusual oddity, with its garish 70's Italo-trash aesthetics and Liz Taylor’s unhinged performance. 

 

The premise of Identikit reminded me very much of Martin Amis' London Fields, which I’d read many years ago and was intrigued by its morbid subject matter, mostly because I was a teenager and I'd never read anything like it before. I realize now that Amis was likely influenced by The Driver's Seat when he wrote London Fields:  both Lise and Nicola Six are ‘murderees’ by their own design.  As a reader also observed: Amis tends to get excoriated for his creation of Six, as if she’s the creation of a misogynist. Yet is she really that different a creation from Lise?  

 

After having watched Identikit, I wanted to get my hands on Muriel Spark's novella.

 

While reading the book, much of the mystery surrounding Lise’s motives was gone having already watched the film adaptation, which was incredibly faithful to The Driver’s Seat.  However, the book did provide a tiny clue into her erratic and unconventional behaviour (that seemed to be missing in the film):

Her lips are slightly parted: she, whose lips are usually pressed together with the daily disapprovals of the accountants’ office where she has worked continually, except for the months of illness, since she was 18, that is to say, for 16 years and some months. Her lips, when she does not speak or eat, are normally pressed together like the ruled line of a balance sheet, marked straight with her old-fashioned lipstick, a final and judging mouth, a precision instrument.

Lise seemed to have undergone some kind of long-term health issue and her death-wish may be due to the fact that she had some form of terminal illness, which she hadn't divulged to anyone.

A Letterboxd reviewer for Identikit took the words out of my mouth:

I was struck by how incredibly faithful the film is to the source, even adhering closely to the clever way the book plays with time. Giuseppe Patroni Griffi's images support the text wonderfully right from the opening shots of nude mannequins with heads covered in shiny reflecting foil. There is a constant motif of bright backlighting as well, reflecting the harsh personality of Lise, forcing your eyes to adjust and create definition. All lovely ways of reinforcing a story that centers around the concept of identity, and how we form and control the way we are perceived.

Much like Identikit, I wasn't sure whether I liked The Driver's Seat, but I certainly appreciated its oddness, its unsettling-ness, its frankness, as well as its leanness, much like this reader: 

 I decided to reread a book that is one of her shortest, most memorable and certainly starkest…  The Driver’s Seat (1970) is 101 pages long (in the irksome style of technology manufacturers who describe their products as “7.2mm thin”, I suppose I should say it’s 101 pages short). That is important because first, it shows that Spark has no interest in padding out her story – it is not one of those novels that is really an abruptly promoted novella – and second, because it means the story has almost no middle. It’s lean and hungry. There are many books whose beginnings or endings are praised, but how often do we say, The middle of that book? I couldn’t get enough of it. When you see a book without a middle – Patrick McGrath’s Dr Haggard’s Disease also comes to mind – it’s likely that rather than having only a beginning and an end, what has really happened is that the author has followed Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to “start as close to the end as possible.”

The Driver's Seat,was very much a dark, existential journey (physical and psychological) of a woman who lived a conventional life who comes to realize she doesn't have much to lose, and is looking for a way to end her life in her own terms, yet is still limited in agency due to 20th c. (patriarchal) society.  It was even shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1970.  I would definitely read more Muriel Spark, if I come across her other books.