Muriel Spark had enough brains for two normal people but this little novel was almost completely stupid. It was like a terrible joke whose heavily adumbrated punchline is a tiresome and obvious inversion of normal reality, like a banana slipping on the skin of a man. You carry on reading this book, and it is very readable, and doesn't take long, because you can't believe what you are suspecting will be the outcome will really be the outcome, and it is, that's all, no explanation, no nothing. Spark's fans mutter that this is a masterpiece. John Lanchester's introduction says : 
 It is fair to say that The Driver's Seat is not one of her most famous books. That, I think, is because it doesn't tell us a single thing that we want to know. 
 (view spoiler)[ This is very true - I do not wish to know that this world is one in which a woman with a responsible job and a steady life freaks out one day and rushes about trying to find a man who will murder her; & having located him, has to cajole and persuade him into stabbing her to death. This kind of nonsense is called "dark" and "subversive" by some people but I call it "stupid" and "puerile". (hide spoiler)] 
 Okay, as ever, I usually try to find something I liked in a book I hated, and this made me smile. The year is 1969 or 1970 and the protagonist Lise is with an old lady who is confused by all the social changes of the 60s. They're in a large department store. The old dear says 
 "Is she what they call a hippy?" 
 "This one's a hippy," says Lise, indicating with her head a slouching bearded youth dressed in tight blue jeans, no longer blue, his shoulders draped with an assortment of cardigans and fringed leather garments, heavy for the time of year. 
 Mrs Fiedke looks with interest and whispers to Lise 
 "They are hermaphrodites. It isn't their fault.