Volume 18, Number 7 · April 20, 1972
The Sisterhood
By Karl Miller
Not to Disturb
by Muriel Spark
Viking, 121 pp., $5.00
An Accidental Man
by Iris Murdoch
Viking, 442 pp., $7.95
The Home
by Penelope Mortimer
Random House, 258 pp., $5.95
Two, A Phallic Novel
by Alberto Moravia
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 353 pp., $7.95
Both the new novel by Muriel Spark and the one by Iris Murdoch are as imponderable as they are entertaining, and that is not all they have in common. They have Muriel Spark in common. Iris Murdoch's An Accidental Man presents the eccentricities of bed-sitter people in London, and its bounders and bachelors are quite like those who inhabited the early fiction of Muriel Spark, and who even lend something of themselves to the extraordinary mortals in the relatively disembodied recent work Not to Disturb. Both books also have Ivy Compton-Burnett in common. Outcrops of what seems very like her sibylline language might be taken to indicate a line of descent, a weird sisterhood, for these literary women.
Review, 2617 words
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