The Finishing School by Muriel Spark Doubleday $200 Writers sometimes fantasise about teaching creative writing classes, where they'll meet congenial company. If they do run classes, often they find that many students attend only to get credits, most are clumsy and, worst of all, a rare student is more talented than they are. Rowland, 29, the creative writing teacher in The Finishing School, is troubled by insouciant 17-year-old Chris Wiley. They come together at Sunrise College, a finishing school at Ouchy on a Swiss lake, where rich parents park their offspring. The students are told by Nina, Rowland's wife and co-founder of the school, that it aims to finish them 'like the finish on furniture'. The other purpose of the school is to maintain Rowland while he completes what he hopes will be his first published novel. Chris threatens to arrive first. A skilled self-promoter, he's had nibbles from three publishers and a filmmaker about his novel reinterpreting the story of Mary Queen of Scots. Rowland's 'envious jealousy' and 'jealous envy' of Chris ('he thought with tormented satisfaction of Chris dying in his sleep') block his own efforts to write, but prove a stimulus for the younger man. In a strange way, they need each other. Only a spoilsport would reveal the developments which, if surprising, are not arbitrary. Muriel Spark takes the opportunity to make fun of publishers who flick through novels briefly before deciding whether to publish and of the received wisdom that characters acquire a life of their own in novelists' heads: 'Nobody in my book so far could cross the road unless I make them do it,' Chris says. Interviewed at the recent Literary Festival in Mantua, Spark, 86, identified the critic and poet Derek Stanford as a starting point for this excursus on envy, which corrodes the literary world and much else. She was close to Stanford in London early in her career, but had more success than her friend, which blocked his writing. 'He's still talking badly of me,' she says. The early 19th-century novelist Thomas Love Peacock specialised in concise satirical narratives in which literary friends such as Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth figured. Spark has proved the vitality of such an approach. When so many novels give the impression that the authors don't take enough time to write them short, Spark shows the virtues of tautness. Her latest sprightly narrative provides the pleasure of contact with a mind as sharp as a tack and which delights in human foibles.