The Driver's Seat
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First published in 1970, Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat is a chilling, brilliantly unconventional novella about a woman determined to take control of her own fate. Lise, an apparently ordinary office worker, leaves her routine behind and travels to an unnamed European city, where she begins an increasingly peculiar search for a man. Dressed in an unmistakably garish outfit and behaving with disconcerting unpredictability, she moves through a succession of encounters that leave strangers bewildered and unsettled. From the opening pages, however, the reader knows that Lise will be murdered.
Spark turns the conventions of the psychological thriller inside out, revealing the ending before the journey has properly begun. Through an unsettling combination of black comedy, narrative experiment and psychological ambiguity, she explores free will, violence, identity and the limits of human control. Spare, darkly comic and formally daring, The Driver’s Seat is among Spark’s most radical works, a disturbing meditation on fate and agency that has acquired an enduring place in twentieth-century experimental fiction.
From the book
“It makes me sad,” she says. “I want to go home, I think. I want to go back home and feel all that lonely grief again. I miss it so much already.”
— Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat
On The Driver’s Seat
“Her spiny and treacherous masterpiece.”
— The New Yorker