Word: sparked
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...Only Problem, Muriel Spark's latest novel, slides by with the elegant concision of a parable. Spark's economical narration, piercing judgment, and marvelous ear give her story the easy-to-watch quality of a cartoon, while the explicit statement of her concerns evokes a depth which is left for the reader to supply. Reading her novel is like looking at the reflections on the surface of a slow, but full and moving stream...
Nothing could be simpler than Spark's subject, Harvey and Effie Gotham's marriage. Harvey is a rich man who doesn't have to work and who spends his abundant leisure time studying the Book of Job, on which he is preparing an essay. The problem of why suffering exists is, for him, the only problem. Effie is a generous-spirited but angry woman, an antinomian who feels that her anger at the excesses and errors of capitalism means that she does not have to abide by the rules--anyone's rules...
...ONLY PROBLEM by Muriel Spark; Putnam; 179 pages...
...Muriel Spark's 17th novel is informed with that perception. Her central character is a pained, Job-like figure regarded in a comic light, as if, between losses, he is playing God's fool. It is a difficult role. Harvey Gotham is a wealthy scholar-dilettante who retires to rural France in his mid-30s. There he occupies himself with a monograph on the riddle of universal suffering: If the Lord is beneficent, why does his earth contain so much misery? On the bestseller list that conundrum is called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Here...
...Spark once wrote, half whimsically, that in the Book of Job "there are points of characterization and philosophy on which I think I could improve." Her alterations chiefly consist of attempts at clever explication. Job's suffering "became a habit," theorizes Harvey. "He not only argued the problem of suffering, he suffered the problem of argument. And that is incurable." As for the comforters, at least they "kept him company. And they took turns as analyst. Job was like the patient on the couch." But, Harvey concludes, the Book of Job teaches us "the futility of friendship in times...