Word: sparked
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...Spark's story is the narration of the break-up of this marriage. Harvey and Effie part ways abruptly when Effie reveals to Harvey that she has just stolen two chocolate bars. This peccadillo, superadded to other problems in the marriage--Effie married Harvey for his money, has had frequent affairs, and disagrees with him on most important things--causes their separation. Harvey retires to a village in France to continue his work on Job. Effie takes a lover, has a baby, drops her lover, and, having taken another, becomes a terrorist. Her activities for the Front de la Liberation...
...Spark's novel, the fruit of a simple but profound analysis, reveals how easily a love which is not tending to perfection or at least to improvement can be perverted to supply the energy for a really malicious hatred. Effie and Harvey are attracted to each other because they are, in some sense, opposites. He admires her for her uselessness, even while criticizing the impractical applications of her idealism. Effie, on the other hand, finds Harvey quite useful. Effie uses Harvey efficiently and thoroughly, employing his house for her affairs and trying, after the split, to get a large divorce...
...later Spark reveals that, however much Harvey objects, "The thought that Effie was a member of a terrorist band now excited Harvey sexually." Though Harvey and Effie are still in love with each other, they exaggerate their individual characteristics--Harvey with the Book of Job, Effie with a machine gun--in an attempt to prove how really separate they...
...Spark's effortless casual linkage of a bad marriage and a shooting spree is not the least of her accomplishments. One of the lasting delights of the book is Spark's almost infallible ear. At a press conference about his wife, a reporter asks Harvey...
...Spark generously and cleverly shares her wit with her characters. When, at the press conference, a reporter draws an analogy between Harvey and job, Harvey retorts, "I am hardly in the position of Job. He was covered with boils, for one thing, which I am not." Talking of Job, Harvey reveals something of Spark's own intentions when he observes that "He not only argues the problem of suffering, he suffered the problem of argument. And that is incurable." Spark, cautioned by her own character, does not argue for her own moral position but directs all her energies...