Muriel Spark read Henry James

I'd been reading Henry James and switched to Muriel Spark who also read Henry James, and, in Loitering With Intent, pulls herself up short for writing something Henry James would have written. She steers her writing passage through all she has read and all she has lived. She's abrasive and cool, if not nasty. Switched from being jew-ish to full Roman Catholicism. She was my parents' generation. They talked about Memento Mori with their friends circa 1960 — a novel in which everyone dies — with an excited contemporaneity beyond my emotional age. I took note. I re-read Muriel Spark rarely enough to forget the plots and often enough to know how this kind of wryness works, where she is in relation to what she writes, how she digs and evades. She's there all the time, that's for sure. The hand of Muriel is on yours from the start.