symposium

Symposium by Muriel Spark (Houghton Mifflin, 1990)

An elegant (of course), but under-sustained and underwhelming late and minor novel by Spark.  Hurly (an American painter, male) and Chris (a rich Australian widow, female) are giving a dinner party for ten people in the elegant London home were they happily cohabit.  We get scenes of dialogue from the dinner itself interlaced with scenes of “back story”, both past and recent, of all the guests.  The most attention is paid to a Margaret Damien, a young Scotts woman recently (and somewhat suspiciously) married to the heir of an Australian female business magnate of vast fortune.  Margaret is something of an Angel of Death (although she has a brief stint as a nun in a peculiar London convent); she seems to conjure, or perhaps arrange, death wherever she goes.

Although the many splintery shards of this book fail to add up into anything compelling or coherent, it’s all written with Spark’s frosty witty slyness and panache.  But lots of it seem second-rate, and carelessly conceived and executed.  A brief, harmless, disappointment.