A deeply intelligent, captivating and passionate work that reminds us of everything a literary biography can and should be ... Wilson has the utmost respect for Spark, but more important for a biographer, she has fervent curiosity about her ... Who was the real Muriel Spark? We may never know, and that’s the joy and delight of this book.
Wilson revels in her sublimely contrary subject ... Wilson...feels free to focus on the parts of Spark’s life that informed her art—and luckily for us, these are plentiful, both because Spark liked to rework her own experiences and acquaintances for her fiction, and because her life tended toward the fantastical in ways that served her writing.
A darting, innovative example of the form — perhaps more Ouija board than book ... Illuminates a weirder, more wayward writer than I ever grasped as an aspiring member of the Brodie set ... The biographer’s own surveillance is through a magnifying glass, and her book is a fire starter.
Pleasurable and interesting as this biography is, it feels as if it misses the point of the impersonal in Spark’s approach. Her own life is in there, for sure, but distilled into its purest form, which is to say a human comedy, where dark forces seem to triumph, unaware that they are being skewered by a sharp and all-seeing eye.
Deeply informed by readings in Spark, her subjects, influences and contemporaries, the book is studded with capsule summaries—not just of Spark’s works, but other books Spark read, appeared in, or paralleled in some way. The connections Wilson makes across all these sources are at once awe-inspiring and mind-numbing ... Doesn’t replace Stannard’s, or Curriculum Vitae, but it has its own rewards for those with a taste for them.
[Wilson] has written about Spark with a brilliant recreative justice to the brilliant shot of lightning that illuminates everything Spark did, but also the formal brilliance of the work and the way it remained – in ways that are at once wacko and regally impressive – the imprint of a personality that was both magnificent and alarming.
Wilson’s style is so original and engaging that many readers will hope that the second part of Spark’s life, covering her life as a famous author until her death at 88 in 2006, will form a future volume ... Tempting and extraordinary morsels.
Wilson is not any old biographer. Her books are intense, eclectic and wildly diversionary, her intelligence rising from their pages like steam – and in Spark, the cleverest and the weirdest of them all, she may have found her ultimate subject ... A brilliant book ... There is an uncanny closeness between biographer and subject at play here, and I find myself wondering whether Wilson didn’t feel at times as if her manuscript wasn’t a form of automatic writing.
Capacious and penetrating ... That [Wilson] writes at times with an alarming zeal is part of her book’s interest and pleasure ... Wilson’s receptive approach pays off throughout her book, and strikingly in a bravura final chapter that mixes deft scholarship and spookiness.
Fitfully illuminating the novels ... It’s the wealth of down-to-earth detail assiduously amassed here that admirers of Muriel Spark will more likely relish.
One of the reasons why Wilson can offer a complete portrait despite her limited scope is that most of the significant events of Spark’s life, and the basis for most of her fiction, had taken place by the time she published her first novel ... Wilson is understandably drawn to a period when a formidable writer devoted her energies to biographical projects ... Illuminating.
Wilson artfully...flash[es] forward through her biography, so that you often see Spark’s future in the instant ... Wilson does well to focus on the period leading up to The Comforters...because most of Spark’s best writing was rooted in her life before 1960.
Wilson places Spark’s superstitions center stage and guides us through a web of fate and coincidence ... Her book ‘is not…strictly, a biography' .. There are moments in Electric Spark when the writing rises to a plausible imitation of Spark’s comic bleakness, her elegant deadpan ... But Wilson often repeats herself…and aims for clever turns of phrase that end up saying too little ... Wilson’s discovery is worth the price of admission.
As odd and brilliant as its subject. Like Spark, Wilson is a delightfully strange writer ... Wilson isn’t afraid to play with the structure and scope of the genre ... Electric Spark does interesting things with form as well. To be sure, all of the traditional stuff of biography is present and done exceedingly well ... There’s also something spooky about the biographer’s task, calling up the dead and making them speak once again. Wilson is suited for this challenge, in part because she recognizes just how eerie it is.
A Muriel Spark novel is contained in its title.” Likewise, Frances Wilson’s own premise, hurdles, and conclusions are found in her title: Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel. She is an apt student of her subject, and Spark indeed may have found her desired literary biographer here. Just possibly, Wilson’s reading of the work and the woman behind it might even have elicited partial approval from the irascible author.
Frances Wilson, a fine stylist herself, as well as an enterprising researcher and venturesome critic, has written a provocative new study of Spark’s life packed with the kind of details, puzzles and wordplay that Spark revered ... Because Wilson is such an ambitious and lively writer, committed to digging deep, Electric Spark is engaging throughout. The force and clarity of her arguments, however debatable, do her subject the literary justice she deserves.
