The Hothouse by the East River by Muriel Spark (1973)

We meet a married couple in Manhattan, their children and friends, and soon wonder if one of them is insane, and if so, which one, or is it in fact all of them.

Book Review: The Hothouse by the East River is a bad dream, perhaps Muriel Spark's, perhaps ours. Not a nightmare, never so bad that one wakes up in a shaking panic trying to scream. Just constantly uncomfortable, uncertain, at times absurd or surreal, definitely mad. At least someone is, but the madness is calm, quite polite, courteous even. We quickly enter the minds of everyone, listening to them speak and think and fret, living their hellish lives, and we still don't know who, or which of them, is insane.

One is in good hands with Muriel Spark: she is always more clever than her reader, never sentimental, and always in control. Although in a novel as unbalanced as this one (I've read over a dozen of her books and this is the most disordered), the reader might reasonably (but unnecessarily) have doubts about her command of the situation. Her writing can be an acquired taste; she's like no one else.  Unlike so many of her novels, in The Hothouse by the East River religion is not obviously front and center, but instead psychiatry is a constant presence.

By the end of The Hothouse by the East River, the reader learns more, and almost enough. Still, the reader wonders if this a traditional story of long lineage, satire, metaphor, allegory, a fever dream. Perhaps a puzzle or a game of cat and mouse with her readers being the mice (as an ardent Spark fan I'm happy to be the rodent). Part of the joy of reading Muriel Spark is that she respects the reader's intelligence and assumes (right or wrong) that we're up to the challenge.  [3★]