It was in Crete that I first came to curse short skirts. Six of them — three cotton, two denim — I had with me in a navy blue American Traveler suitcase, which sat, for the duration of my three-week vacation in the small fishing village of Mochlos, atop a rickety luggage rack in the corner of a small bedroom in a thirty euro a night pension.
Two of my skirts already had their hems rubbed ragged; passing cars made me tug at them in order to hide the bits of woman flesh I unwittingly revealed when I’d walk at night along the village’s only paved road. Sometimes cars honked, but never did I direct my gaze anywhere but down, lest I glimpse a village man’s leer or, worse, the frown of some black-clad yiayia.
Those short skirts sent me scurrying back early to my room many evenings, where I’d pass the time reading my way through a stack of novels I’d brought with me. One book in my stack was Muriel Spark’s 1970 novella The Driver’s Seat, which follows the misadventures of its strange protagonist, Lise. Ostensibly on vacation in Naples for relief from bad nerves, Lise hints that she’s after something altogether different — possibly relief from loneliness, the sort of relief only a Neapolitan lover can bring.
Does Lise have what it takes to find such relief? Spark’s narrator describes her as “neither good-looking nor bad-looking,” and as of indeterminate age, perhaps being as young as twenty-nine, or as old as thirty-six. She has “widely-spaced, blue-grey and dull” eyes, lips “normally pressed together like the ruled line of a balance sheet, marked straight with her old-fashioned lipstick,” and pale-brown hair “cut short at the sides and back, and … styled high.”
In terms of fashion, Lise favors garishly patterned and colored clothing — lemon-yellow tops, skirts in “V’s of orange, mauve and blue,” summer coats striped red and white — with which she creates clashing yet modest ensembles. The narrator reveals that Lise’s “hem-line has been for some years an old-fashioned length, reaching just below her knees.” Had I readThe Driver’s Seat before my trip, I could have learned something from Lise about how a woman should dress for immersion in Mediterranean masculinity. I would never have packed only my minis, which lit so many a Greek fire.
Lise’s sartorial reserve is of a piece with the reserve evinced by the narrative, which is as cool and distant as Neptune. Stephen Schiff of The New Yorker found The Driver’s Seat “so stark as to be nightmarish.” Lise herself is as emotionally featureless as the pine paneled apartment she keeps “clean-lined and clear” so as to appear “as if it were uninhabited.”
Indeed, the narrative discourse has a sort of Wittgensteinian quality to it: hard and slick as a sheet of ice. It resists interpretation. Spark doesn’t permit you firm purchase; just when you think you have got the narrative all figured out, your interpretive anchor point gives way and you find yourself flat on your back.
But I suspect that this interpretive slip-slide-and-away is exactly the point. The Driver’s Seat investigates the fractures and fragments of a blown out, benumbed postmodern world. Characters encounter one another but never engage. Miscommunication is the rule. This only makes sense, because the men and women who populate the stark landscape of The Driver’s Seat are little more than droll, ill-defined objects to begin with. A woman is described as “emitting noise like a brown container of laughing gas.” Men are types, nationalities are indeterminate. Lise variously describes herself as American, English or, when she feels for some reason secretive, of no national origin at all. The world of The Driver’s Seat is static, flat, fatalistic and, with the notable exception of Lise’s ensembles, etiolated.
My favorite scene happens during Lise’s flight to Naples, where, appareled in one such ensemble, she is served a “mid-morning compromise snack composed of salami on lettuce, two green olives, a rolled-up piece of boiled ham containing a filling of potato salad and a small pickled something, all laid upon a slice of bread,” which she ingests with gusto. Lise also devours “a round cake, swirled with white and chocolate cream, and a corner of silver-wrapped processed cheese with biscuits wrapped in cellophane,” and then begins to eye greedily her seatmate’s meal.
Lise’s seatmate, who follows a macrobiotic diet, observes her stealing glances. “Yin and Yang are philosophies,” he tells her. “That salami is Yin and those olives are Yin. They are full of toxics.” He hands Lise his tray. She bites into his open sandwich, saying, “I’ll eat it if you don’t want it. After all, it’s paid for, isn’t it?” Lise laughs, her seatmate smiles. He will later ask her to facilitate a hygienic orgasm. For now he gives Lise the food he does not want and, with polite insistence, says only, “Help yourself,” adding, “you’ll soon change your eating habits, though, now that we’ve got to know each other.”
Lise’s eating habits (along with everything else) do indeed change; there occurs not twenty-four hours later a fateful scene involving an orange scarf, a dull, curved paper-knife, and a man’s necktie…
