Books like The Girls of Slender Means
A telephone rings with news of Nicholas Farringdon’s death, and the May of Teck Club—its rationing, rivalries and precarious glamour—returns intact from 1945. These three novels share Spark’s rare fusion of comedy, compression, social exactness and lurking judgment.
If you liked The Girls of Slender Means, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Girls of Slender Means, and we tell you exactly what.
Bainbridge is perhaps Spark’s closest rival in making impending calamity seem horribly funny. Two mismatched women working in a London bottling factory arrange an outing with their colleagues; from this unpromising material she produces a compact masterpiece of vanity, sexual menace and social misunderstanding.
Like Spark, Bainbridge never tells you whom to pity or when to stop laughing. Her characters’ fantasies collide with the world’s indifference, and every comic detail quietly tightens the trap. Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, this is one of Bainbridge’s defining novels: brief enough to consume at once, unsettling enough to keep revising itself in your memory.
If you loved Spark’s scrutiny of the way women observe, classify and wound one another, read Bowen. Sixteen-year-old Portia comes to live with her sophisticated half-brother and his wife in interwar London, carrying a diary and an earnest hunger for affection into a household governed by taste, evasiveness and self-protection.
Bowen renders rooms, clothes and pauses in conversation with almost forensic force. As in The Girls of Slender Means, elegance is not decoration but moral evidence: people reveal themselves through what they notice, covet and refuse to say. Widely regarded as one of Bowen’s masterpieces, the novel turns social comedy into an exacting study of innocence among people who consider themselves civilized.
Freddie Wentworth runs a chaotic London school for child actors, presiding over theatrical prodigies, shabby teachers and adults whose self-deceptions are scarcely less elaborate than anything performed onstage. Fitzgerald makes this miniature institution feel like a complete society, just as Spark does with the May of Teck Club.
The pleasure lies in Fitzgerald’s speed and selective precision: one dry sentence can expose a hierarchy, puncture a romance or make a ridiculous person unexpectedly moving. Yet beneath the bustle is Spark-like unease about talent, exploitation and the danger of treating life as a performance. Fitzgerald later won the Booker Prize, but many devoted readers cherish At Freddie’s as the purest example of her sly, economical comedy—and one of the funniest short novels about people living by illusion.