Volume 21, Number 19 · November 28, 1974
Fiction in Extremis
By Michael Wood
The Abbess of Crewe
by Muriel Spark
Viking, 116 pp., $6.95
The Connoisseur
by Evan S. Connell Jr.
Knopf, 197 pp., $6.95
The Mystic Adventures of Roxie Stoner
by Berry Morgan
Houghton Mifflin, 146 pp., $5.95
There is a precision and a poise to Muriel Spark's prose which suggest that we are in good hands. 'The poplars,' we read on the first page of The Abbess of Crewe, 'cast their shadows in the autumn afternoon's end, and the shadows lie in regular still file across the pathway like a congregation of prostrate nuns of the Old Order.' Later, we inspect this careful scene: 'The self-controlled English sun makes leafy shadows fall on this polished table and across the floor. A bee importunes at the window pane. The parlor is cool and fresh.' This is a quiet, straight-faced world in which wry, comic slips and falls are about to take place. As in the following speech by the future abbess of Crewe, addressing a pair of visiting Jesuits:
Review, 3333 words
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