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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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] 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.
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.
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.