Spark’s kind of religion seems bafflingly idiosyncratic.” She did not regularly attend Mass or go to confession. (Tellingly, the older writers were early and consistent supporters of Spark’s work.) As Frank Kermode, the eminent English academic critic (and Spark partisan), once commented, “Mrs. All three seem to have embraced the religion for what might be called its secondary advantages, without the inconveniences of observance: faith without belief. Like Waugh and Greene, Spark took Catholicism as a very sometime thing. She forms, with Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, “a grand triumvirate of Catholic-convert novelists,” in the words of her biographer, Martin Stannard. It is those allusions to the supernatural that have earned Spark critical cachet.
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The New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani once described Spark’s formula: “Take a self-enclosed community (of writers, schoolgirls, nuns, rich people, etc.) that is full of incestuous liaisons and fraternal intrigue toss in a bombshell (like murder, suicide, or betrayal) that will ricochet dangerously around this little world and add some allusions to the supernatural to ground these melodramatics in an old-fashioned context of good and evil.” She wrote 22 novels, in which the inexplicable and fantastic are presented as commonplace, with an airy, supercilious insinuation that the truth is unknown and unknowable. Born to working-class Edinburgh parents in 1918, Spark became a jet setter, with residences in London, New York, and Rome, before settling in Tuscany, where she died in 2006. She is best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, her slim 1961 novel about the influence of an Edinburgh teacher on her young female pupils, which made her a literary star following its publication in The New Yorker and adaptation for stage and screen. In his chronicles, Mehta builds a powerful, very moving case for the punctilious, ""invisible art"" of his former boss.Muriel Spark is the mistress of mystification of postwar British fiction. Indeed, once he jogs our memory, it comes almost as a shock that something as eccentric and rigorously uncommercial as Shawn's New Yorker could have existed so recently, or vanished so completely from the literary scene. Newhouse asserted his new control of the magazine by firing Shawn and replacing him with Robert Gottlieb, Mehta's nostalgia for the ""old,"" independent New Yorker is still contagious. But, even a decade after publishing tycoon S.I. Like the real Boswell, Mehta (who joined the New Yorker's staff in 1959 and was ""terminated"" by Tina Brown in 1994) tends to get in the way of his more interesting mentor, dropping names, telling tales and settling scores with tiresome self-importance at times his adulation of Shawn seems to call less for a memoir than for a few hours on the analyst's couch.
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As the eighth volume in the memoir series Continents of Exile, Mehta's account suffers from a dual focus. During his self-effacing stewardship, Shawn shifted the emphasis of the magazine from the satire and whimsy of his predecessor, Harold Ross, to serious in-depth reportage, all the while maintaining the elegance and integrity for which the magazine was famous-qualities generally thought to have faded from its pages since his departure. A poignant tribute from a flawed but well-placed Boswell, Mehta's book revisits (through memories, letters and interviews) the career of William Shawn, who edited the New Yorker from 1951 to 1987.
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