The Finishing School
by Muriel Spark
Doubleday $200
Writers sometimes fantasise about teaching creative writing classes, where they'll meet congenial company. If they do run classes, often they find that many students attend only to get credits, most are clumsy and, worst of all, a rare student is more talented than they are.
Rowland, 29, the creative writing teacher in The Finishing School, is troubled by insouciant 17-year-old Chris Wiley. They come together at Sunrise College, a finishing school at Ouchy on a Swiss lake, where rich parents park their offspring. The students are told by Nina, Rowland's wife and co-founder of the school, that it aims to finish them 'like the finish on furniture'. The other purpose of the school is to maintain Rowland while he completes what he hopes will be his first published novel.
Chris threatens to arrive first. A skilled self-promoter, he's had nibbles from three publishers and a filmmaker about his novel reinterpreting the story of Mary Queen of Scots. Rowland's 'envious jealousy' and 'jealous envy' of Chris ('he thought with tormented satisfaction of Chris dying in his sleep') block his own efforts to write, but prove a stimulus for the younger man. In a strange way, they need each other.
