Alex's Reviews > The Driver's Seat

Lise doesn't make sense. She acts like a lunatic - not even a real lunatic, a lunatic's conception of a lunatic. All the way through the book, I thought: "Really? This is the plot? This seems very far-fetched." It seems like a story a lunatic would come up with. She gets herself into very dangerous situations with men - some would even say she's leading them on and then stealing their cars. She keeps mumbling about her imaginary boyfriend, whom she's looking for, who doesn't exist yet. "Will you feel a presence? Is that how you’ll know?" says the old lady Lise takes shopping for no reason. and "Not really a presence," Lise says. "The lack of an absence." What is she talking about? Why did she plant her passport carefully in a cab? No one does that. If this is what's happening, it's not a very good book.

But I gave this five stars, because (view spoiler)[it doesn't happen. When Lise describes the book she's carrying as a "whydunnit", Spark is talking about this book, and I think this book is really the answer to "Why did you do it?" It's a confession.

We never meet Lise. The woman in this book exists only in the mind of the guy who killed her. Everything she does - leading men on, ending up with things this guy's mother bought, planting her passport in a cab, looking for "her type," whom she will mystically know when she sees - they suddenly make sense if they've been invented by a murderous nutcase. When she finally finds him and orders him to murder her - "Tie my feet and kill, that's all. They will come and sweep it up in the morning." - well, that's how it is for lunatics.

This doesn't seem like a crazy theory to me. The last paragraph says, "The typewriter ticks out his unnerving statement," which seems to me like Spark is explaining the book to us. But I don't see this explanation kicking around elsewhere, so I don't know. This is why I think he did it. (hide spoiler)]

And then on a third level, also, we're talking about Flaubert and Tolstoy, right? There's this whole genre of men (view spoiler)[who murder women they've invented: who invent women who demand to be killed. (hide spoiler)] Men writing women behaving badly - what men define as badly - who are punished by these same men, to teach a lesson. "Do not behave in this way that I insist you keep behaving in." That might be getting a little too "here's my postgrad thesis" about the whole thing, but it does work.