The Finishing School (Spoilers)

Muriel Spark's The Finishing School is an intriguing novel about a student at a contemporary finishing school who writes a novel and the older teacher who is obsessively jealous of this student. The novel that the student is writing is about a murder committed by a jealous man. At first, you think that the older teacher (who is also writing a novel, as well as teaching a creative writing class) is going mad. Then you realize that the student novelist is sort of mad. Later, the two end up together in a civil union. In the process, Sparks explores the role of artistic control over one's characters (the young student controls his artistic creation, but also seeks to control the teacher).

All of this is framed by Aristotle's assertion in the Poetics: "A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end." Sparks doesn't start at the beginning--she begins midway through the action, in the middle of the teacher's creative writing class, when the teacher is emphasizing the importance of setting the scene through an example about writing about the weather. It isn't until the middle of the book that you get the beginnings (and peeks into the end [those who don't like spoilers may not like this book]). And the end of the book stops with a broken phrase from the beginning of one of the students, whose become a meteorologist,'s weather report. Throughout the entire novel, Sparks plays. Even the title is a play on endings (which the student also struggles with about his novel).