Electric Spark

Wilson's biography deliberately stops chasing Muriel Spark chronologically through her whole life and instead camps out in the chaos before her fame: the failed marriage, a breakdown, wartime espionage work, a bitter custody dispute, poverty, and a Catholic conversion, treating that scramble of selves as the actual engine of her fiction rather than mere backstory. Wilson reads Spark's novels back into her biography and vice versa, arguing her subject essentially authored her own life the way she plotted a book. It's a device that produces real insight into how a woman that unsettled became a novelist of such cool control, though it also pulls Wilson into digressions on literary infighting and a slightly mystical reading of Spark's instincts that not every reviewer buys.