muriel sparks, the prime of miss jean brodie

So I had a miniature revelation with this book, which is this: a lot of books written around the early to middle part of the century seem, despite the almost entirely modern use of language, very dated, specifically because, despite some very lyrical and/or precise and/or witty descriptions of _scenarios_, the characters themselves remain shadowy and imprecise, and you never get a sense of any of them as real people, and the words spoken by any one of them (no matter how ironic/clever) could have been spoken by any of them. In some of them, I think this is definitely a purposeful narrative trick, for instance the character of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby is sort of unknowable because it's not him that's important, it's Gatsby. Likewise in the Good Soldier, I never really felt that the narrator was a real person, and the whole thing consisted of these four interchangeable cardboard cutout rich disaffected people hanging out making comments about the weather to each other into which you were meant to read all sorts of hidden meaning about the unhappiness and pointlessness of modern life. (This may not be fair, since I read both Gatsby and the Good Soldier a long time ago, and I do remember quite liking bits of the Good Soldier in terms of the prose style; it's just specifically a lack of clarity when it comes to characterization; none seem to have a consistent individual _voice_ about which you can confidently say, aha, that's so-and-so's sense of humour/pessimism/obsession/whatever, I recognize that character by what they have to say, not just because the author has told me that that person just walked in the room.

I liked The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - there are some funny and perceptive bits in it, but it was like Muriel Sparks couldn't decide what she wanted Jean Brodie to be and I never felt clear about who this person was. In some bits, she is a slightly fruity but actually quite wise teacher who absolutely deserves the loyalty of her 'girls' (e.g. teaching them about Italian art history and taking them to the theatre on her own dime against the disapproval of the narrowminded headmistress) and who doesn't deserve the tragedy of not being able to be with the unsuitable man she loves; in the next scene she is a caricature of a harmless and slightly vain woman who plays favourites from pique; in the next she is a self-deluded monster who endorses fascism and naziism out of (you hope) total ignorance, and the headmistress is quite right to be trying to oust her from the school. It wasn't that these different inconsistent pictures of Jean Brodie presented an evolution of the character, either, which might have explained the girls' gradual shift from loyalty to her to disinterest to actively despising her; Miss Brodie alternated seemingly at random between fruity/wise/vain/self-deluded/ahead of her time/politically appalling throughout the entire book. The girls, likewise, were more or less interchangeable, and the one character trait that each was assigned (and that was insisted upon throughout the book) seemed totally artificial. Rose was 'famous for sex,' Monica was good at maths, Mary was lumpish and blamed for everything... etc. but at no point did any of the girls say anything that could not have been said by any of the others, and none of them was ever given any character traits above and beyond their one officially assigned one, which felt unconvincing and gimmicky anyway. What kind of character trait is 'being good at maths' if it doesn't actually make a difference to the story? Hm. Which is not to say that I didn't _like_ the book; there were some phrases that made me giggle out loud, and others that seemed peculiarly perceptive (especially in relation to the cruelty that adolescents use to mask insecurity about adult love affairs); some of Miss Brodie's battinesses were disarmingly sweet; and the plot took me by surprise in places; but the characters never properly solidified for me.

Next up... Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Rebecca Goldstein, The Dark Sister. Also, I reread (ha!) Anne Fadiman's Rereading, but I was jetlagged while I read it and I think some of that "reading" actually consisted of my lying with the left side of my face squashed up against the page drooling into the binding, so I can't count it. (Can I count Time Out Tokyo and Tokyo: A Bilingual Street Atlas?)