Attention! The following has spoilers!
A book that stuck with me is Muriel Spark’s Loitering With Intent. It’s about a career woman, Fleur, who is working on a novel called Warrender Chase. Her boss, a pretentious man of letters I’ll call Sir David, has a small vanity press for peerage types who want to publish biographies. Only people with social credentials will be considered. He presses his customers/students for honesty and meticulous truth telling in their manuscripts, while he milks them for information he can hold over them and worse.
At the beginning Fleur needs a job and is interviewing around. She hears about the position at Sir David’s firm through a friend. She realizes during the interview that Sir David is a terrific snob, but the job that he offers is the best fit, in part because the work of editing these amateur manuscripts comes easily to her.
Sir David runs the firm out of his London home. His mother, Clara, lives with him. Clara is ancient, cared for by housekeeper nurse that she hates. Clara wears bright red lipstick, big jewelry and says outrageous things. She must live with her son because she’s old and dotty, but she’s acutely aware of how awful he is. She’s mischievous, as well as incontinent, urinating where she stands at times to express her discontent, or irritate the nurse, or something. The reader never knows exactly what. She’s sly and funny and has everyone’s number, while being like a child in the way of a very old person. Fleur and Clara become friends, along with another friend of Fleur’s, a lawyer I’ll call Scott, who helps guide Fleur in the legal tangle at the end. They become a trio, Scott and Fleur taking Clara for jaunts here and there in the town. There’s a conspiracy of sorts between them about the dreadful Sir David, though it’s more understated than active. It’s just in the undercurrent between them, and will work out well for Fleur in the end.
All the while, Fleur is writing her Warrender Chase book. About two thirds of the way through Loitering With Intent, the scenes that she has written start coming true among the patrons of the vanity press. Eventually she realizes that a copy of the book has been stolen by Sir David, (who is writing his own memoirs), with the aid of his creepy friend I’ll call Barbara, who is also a sort of “frenemy” of Fleur’s.
No one gets away unscathed, not even the narrator, because she never admits that she has drawn from life for her novel. (Has she? We don’t know.) When Fleur’s book is prophetic, this reader understood that its accuracy came from Fleur’s knack for observation, as well as out of a sort of fateful mystery. In Loitering With Intent, Fleur maintains that she doesn’t know how her novel came about, intimating but not saying that it was an osmotic process. It’s a high concept plot twist which works only because Spark’spowers of observation are so keen. Indeed, the title “Loitering With Intent,” gives much away about fiction writing itself.