Influenced is an interview series featuring authors talking about the works that influenced them.

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Thick Skin, where authors talk about negative reviews, from both critics and readers

Pixelated, the digital, double-blind, lit-inclined author chat

A Bit Contrived, interviews with real authors about improvised books

The Art of Commerce, exploring the intersection of literature and the marketplace

Episode XIII: "Something about shifting the frame"

Published 3/19/17
In this installment, Alix Ohlin talks about Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, arch and harsh writing, earnestness, breaking temporal rules & more.

Today I'm with Alix Ohlin, a novelist and short story writer. I originally came upon Alix's work a couple of months ago, by way of her story in The New Yorker. "Quarantine" is about the ossification of adulthood, and the way friendship can be circumstantial, can slope from one person to the other, how that slope can change. What I appreciated most was how inevitable the characters' lives came to be, while they remained surprising and true along the way.

For this interview, she's chosen to discuss Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which was also first published by The New Yorker. The choice makes sense, ostensibly—it also details the friendships of girls yet formed, and its deft use of prolepsis reminds me of how seamlessly your story speeds along the lives of Bridget and Angela, creating a cohesive picture while forgoing so much detail. When did you first come upon Spark's seminal work?

I first read it in high school, and I didn't get it at all. I had a habit of plucking books off my parents' bookshelves at random, without asking permission, and some of them I loved while others completely went over my head. I think I picked The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie because I was going to a private girls' high school at the time and I thought the experiences described in the book might be similar to mine, or something? I'm not really sure. Anyway the book to me was unfathomable and the humor in it was utterly lost on me. Then I re-read it in graduate school, years later, and fell in love with it.

Was it part of your grad school curriculum? What were your impressions of it on your second go around?

It wasn't something I was required to read, no. I was just interested in novellas and short novels in general, I think—that economical form has appealed to me for a long time. Books like Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider, or Dorothy Baker's Cassandra at the Wedding. Anyway, when I re-read it, I was struck by how nervy it is, for lack of a better word. It seemed as though Spark felt so free with her authorial presence—I loved the forward movements in time, and the ironic distance she has from her characters, and how the book circles around the cast of characters in this energetic way. Also I think it is just so funny.

It seems to me that influential works tend to be influential because of their freeing aspects—less to do with technique or style or tenor but just the basic permission of: this is allowable in fiction. Did you find that was true, that you could write more like yourself after reading it?

I love how you put that. Yes, I think it's so true—books make an impression not by teaching you the rules but by showing you it's OK to break them. I do think that Spark gave me permission to move towards a certain kind of voice in my own work. She's so bold. She makes jokes about fascism! It's really quite transgressive.

If it's not too personal, how would you describe the difference in your own writing between when you read Spark and today?

Hm. Some of the places in which I see connections to Spark have remained pretty steady in my work—the centering of female characters, and not worrying especially about their likeability; an interest in moving around in time; occasional experiments in form. In other ways my writing has evolved to be pretty different from hers—for one thing, as I've gotten older I've become more earnest, I think, which isn't a quality I'd ever ascribe to Spark.

What's the opposite of earnestness, at least in the way of Spark?

I would say some combination of arch and harsh. Harch? The way she describes Sandy Stranger in the book is so mean—every single time the character appears Spark repeats the description her little ugly eyes. Sandy is kind of the villain of the book but it's still mean. (And funny.) And of course Sandy is the one who becomes a nun and writes the bestseller called The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, which sounds like it could be published today as a Marie Kondo-style self-help book. Spark has so much fun at the expense of religion and morality and fame. And all of that is embodied by this character who is, at least at the start of the book, just an imaginative, innocent schoolgirl.

I think there's a point where any form of satire or humor punctures the plane of reality an author constructs, and in my opinion Spark goes beyond that. That archness and the harshness is, I think, apparent in "Quarantine" as well, though it balances the verisimilitude of the story too, works more in tone of the narrator than in the traits or actions of characters. I'm thinking of the last sentence of your first paragraph, "She was twenty-three years old", which carries as much opprobrium as the simple statement of one's age could.

Yes, there's a pretty strong narrative presence in that story, and it has its moments of satire too. You have to be careful with that kind of narrative distance because it can, at times, give the reader permission not to care about the characters, and/or see them as laughable. But Spark is really ingenious with her use of distanced commentary in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, especially in never going inside Miss Jean Brodie's consciousness, so that we only understand her through the perspective of all the girls. It creates so much mystery and momentum even as the narrator is super-present throughout the story, telling you what's going to happen, giving everything away.

That's interesting, that concept of making a character opaque, triangulating them through the surrounding (transparent) cast. Have you tried something similar?

Not exactly, or as boldly, as Spark does here. I did write a novel (INSIDE) that has three main characters and then a fourth whose life is influential to the others but whose point of view is experienced only briefly by the reader. I do find myself, quite often, writing observer characters who are fascinated by other, more spectacular, charismatic characters. I think there's a lot of fiction constructed like that—it provides a way in, and creates a kind of layering effect. The Great Gatsby is an example of that.

And it's almost laughable to think about reversing the equation, having the charismatic character as first person, observing their lay counterpart. It occurs to me that that both falsifies and reproduces life, where others can be fascinating only at a distance, and no one is in fact lay, so to speak, up close. Fiction can create a layering affect, but life isn't layered so evenly. Can you think of another writer you've been influenced by who's a radical realist in the way Spark isn't?

You've given me the idea for my next book, which will be called MY BORING FRIEND . . . Anyway, in terms of different influences, I'd probably list Alice Munro, whose work is more naturalistic than Spark's by far but interestingly (at least to me) often features a bold treatment of time, including jumps, gaps, and use of narrative summary that make the canvas of a short story feel expansive.

Are you less interested in writers who play by the temporal rules?

I do find it really energizing somehow, it almost causes an intake of breath when I read it. Other breaks can do that too—shifts in point of view, or radical plot twists, or anything that foils the reader's expectations. It's something about shifting the frame.

Which is fundamentally where humor comes from as well. What other writers do you look to as influences in that regard?

Lorrie Moore is definitely someone who influenced me a lot, especially her early short story collections—the wordplay and brittleness that just barely masks pain. Similarly there's a book of stories by Julie Hecht called "Do the Windows Open?" that I can never get enough of—all narrated by the same darkly hilarious, dizzyingly neurotic woman. Zadie Smith has a really pointed sense of irony in her work that I appreciate a lot.

And with that we're out of time. This was a pleasure, Alix. Thanks so much for your time and words.