Job Hunting in the Eternal City

By Stefan Kanfer

THE ONLY PROBLEM by Muriel Spark; Putnam; 179 pages; $14.95

In his classic analysis of biblical narrative, The Great Code, Critic Northrop Frye finds that the Book of Job is "classified among the tragedies, but it is technically a comedy by virtue of its 'happy ending,' with Job restored to prosperity."

Muriel Spark's 17th novel is informed with that perception. Her central character is a pained, Job-like figure regarded in a comic light, as if, between losses, he is playing God's fool. It is a difficult role. Harvey Gotham is a wealthy scholar-dilettante who retires to rural France in his mid-30s. There he occupies himself with a monograph on the riddle of universal suffering: If the Lord is beneficent, why does his earth contain so much misery? On the bestseller list that conundrum is called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Here it is entitled The Only Problem.

Harvey endlessly wrestles with that problem, but he has retreated so far from the world that he no longer understands the sources and sorrows of the human condition. He is soon reminded. One morning the police arrive with unsettling news. Harvey originally abandoned his wife Effie because she was not merely unfaithful (he now has custody of her child Clara by a lover); she was also a kleptomaniac specializing in chocolate. Since then her crimes have escalated. She is now a member of the Front for the Liberation of Europe, a violent terrorist gang. The ingenuous Harvey is abruptly surrounded by lawyers and well-wishers who compound his confusion and television reporters who increase his distress. They are, of course, the modem equivalents of Job's comforters and plagues.

Spark once wrote, half whimsically, that in the Book of Job "there are points of characterization and philosophy on which I think I could improve." Her alterations chiefly consist of attempts at clever explication. Job's suffering "became a habit," theorizes Harvey. "He not only argued the problem of suffering, he suffered the problem of argument. And that is incurable." As for the comforters, at least they "kept him company. And they took turns as analyst. Job was like the patient on the couch." But, Harvey concludes, the Book of Job teaches us "the futility of friendship in times of trouble.. . Friends mean well, or make as if they do. But friendship itself is made for happiness."

The problem of The Problem lies in these twinkling asides. They not only provide the book's entertainment, they constitute its substance. The restoration of Harvey's fortunes, his adoption of Clara, his new romance and the completion of the monograph are rushed onstage in the final scenes, as if to emphasize the ironic conclusion: Job's "tragedy was that of the happy ending." That sort of throwaway irony seems worthier of an Oscar Wilde epigram than a meditation on a profound theme. The Book of Job has haunted writings as disparate as Mark Twain's novel The Mysterious Stranger, Robert Frost's verse drama A Masque of Reason and Archibald MacLeish's play J.B. It requires more than bursts of wit and flashes of illumination.

Even so, it must be admitted that the wit is acute and the flashes are brilliant. Spark is one of the few contemporary novelists who are capable of confronting moral dilemmas without abandoning humor or salinity. And her sketches often supply more information than another writer's full-length portraits. An American journalist inquiring about terrorism speaks like a machine gun; Harvey's aunt is "large-built, with a masculine, military face; gray eyes which generally conveyed a warning." Yet when she discusses the meaning of grief, Spark suddenly seems to shrug away significance as if it had no place in a metaphysical comedy: "Scholars try to rationalize Job by rearranging the 3 verses ... but it doesn't make it come clear. The Book of Job will never come clear. It doesn't matter; 'it's a poem."

Spark has obviously built her latest work upon this belief. She has ornamented it with her specialties: elliptical dialogue and scenes with the thinness and tensile strength of piano wire. But in 179 pages she hardly has room for systematic thought, or even to work out the implications of her plot. The Only Problem thus remains a suite of intelligent but lightweight sketches that aim at meaning and end as diversion. Given Spark's interpretation of the text, readers cannot be blamed for following her own line of reasoning: Spark will never come clear. It doesn't matter; it's a novel.

She once regarded novels, recalls Muriel Spark, 66, as "an inferior way of writing." She took that way when a friend told Graham Greene that the young poet and short-story writer needed a patron. He admired her stories and sent a wire applying for the job. When Spark's first novel, The Comforters, was published in 1957, another votary appeared. "Complicated, subtle and . . . highly exhilarating," announced the curmudgeon Evelyn Waugh, and a distinguished career began.

By that time, Spark had moved to South Africa, married and divorced. The slight, birdlike figure began to migrate, first to England and later to Rome. "De pression is the enemy," she decided, and to combat periods of despair she began to turn out a book almost every year.

Although the Spark oeuvre is filled with well-plotted works, like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, about a headstrong schoolmarm, or The Mandelbaum Gate, set in Jerusalem, almost all of her novels have an improvisatory quality, as if the cast were making up some of the story themselves. It is no accident. Spark often begins with little more than a title and a theme. "I don't start out by organizing a whole book," she says, "because so much depends on the characters, and I don't get to know them until things move along." Once a chapter is written out in longhand, it is typed by her friend, Sculptor Penelo pe Jardine, 51. Spark rarely revises her work, even if the book begins to develop in unexpected ways. She usually stays in one place until the novel is well under way, then shuttles between an apartment in Rome, Jardine's Tuscan farmhouse and two-month tours of Europe in an Alfa Romeo.

It is often during those trips that Spark mulls over her next work, in this case a related group of short stories, each narrated by a different personality: "I want to see how many skins I can get into." Most of her novels spring to life immediately; The Only Problem is an exception. The daughter of a Scottish Jew and an Anglican mother, Spark had always pondered various answers to questions of evil. When she co-edited a collection of letters by that most famous British convert to Roman Catholicism, John Henry Cardinal Newman, she recalls, "I got in a position where I couldn't not believe."

Even so, her new faith could not satisfactorily explain the "mysterious, theological and literary" Book of Job. She began a book about the biblical figure, then abandoned it. Almost 30 years passed before Spark could confront the subject again. Even now she cannot wholly accept the doctrines of her church. She attends Mass regularly in Rome, but always arrives after the sermons have been delivered because "I can't stand third-rate productions." Moreover, she believes, "if Christ suffered for the whole world, then we should be finished suffering." And yet, like so many of her characters, she manages to find some virtue in misery. "Everything is painful," says the graceful woman with the wounded eyes. "Thought is painful. Being born is painful." Then the corners of the wide mouth turn up. "And we can turn this pain into pleasure -- because, after all, it is interesting."

--By Stefan Kanfer Reported by Roberto Suro/Rome

Excerpt

"Quiet!" bawled Harvey. 'Either you listen to me in silence or you all go. Job's problem, as I was saying, was partly a lack of knowledge. Everybody talked but nobody told him anything about the reason for his sufferings. Not even God when he appeared. Our limitations of knowledge make us puzzle over the cause of suffering, maybe it is the cause of suffering itself. Quiet, over there! The baby's asleep. And I said, no photographs at present. As I say, we are plonked here in the world and nobody but our own kind can tell us anything. It isn't enough. As for the rest, God doesn't tell. No, I've already told you that I don't know where my wife is. How the Book of Job got into the holy scriptures I really do not know. That's the greatest mystery of all.'"

With reporting by Roberto Suro/Rome