I don’t know what attracts me to some novels and not others, but I love reading Muriel Spark. There is something about the way she puts words together. They seem to mean one thing and they really mean another, like in Jane Austen. They are cool and intellectual — they look at the world from the perspective of a detached narrator who sees and judges it, not in a godlike way, but in the way an art critic might, perceiving how it’s put together, what kinds of pictures it makes and how the artist has accomplished his task. Where the splash of white paint suggests a wave.

There are some novels I can’t read at all, and then I wonder what is wrong with me — why I don’t respond to what other people (often people whose judgments I respect) have liked.

But Muriel Spark is perfect. Recently, I read The Girls of Slender Means, starting it in a bookstore in Kensington High Street, continuing in my temporary flat in Palace Gardens Terrace, almost finishing while sitting in the wildflower meadow at Kensington Palace, and then finally finishing on an airplane from London to Budapest. I realize this sounds impossibly posh, but I sympathize with those girls of slender means, because my entire trip would have been impossible if it had not been paid for by the university for which I was teaching in London, since I am a lecturer of means that are decidedly slender once you take out taxes and healthcare and rent, especially rent. In Boston.

While I was in London, I went to see the Schiaparelli exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This, too, was paid for by the university, since I went as a chaperone to twenty students. The exhibit was fascinating, not only because I was able to see some of Elsa Schiaparelli’s most famous designs (the skeleton dress, the lobster dress, the tear dress, the shoe hat), but also because I was able to compare them to some contemporary couture gowns from the modern House of Schiaparelli. There is a difference between the two, a significant difference. Which is:

Schiaparelli was designing for women, often women she knew personally. Her work is delicate, elegant, witty. The modern house is designing for Instagram. Or maybe YouTube, who knows. But not for women’s bodies.

Elsa’s designs can be worn: you would like to wear them to a dinner party. They would make you look impossibly elegant, and you might worry about dropping food on them, but you would be able to sit at the dinner table, turn and talk to your companion (some random film star or obscure European nobleman), smoke your 1940s cigarette.

The modern designs can be fastened on your body, and you can move in them, or at least turn for the cameras and walk up the stairs to the Met Gala. But you will function as a mannequin — a walking dress form whose purpose is to move the dress from one place to another. The point is the dress, just as in modern architecture the point is the building, rather than the people who live or work in it.

In Elsa’s designs, the point is the woman: the dress is a manifestation of the customer’s own taste, elegance, wit. Just as, in more traditional architecture, the point was the people who inhabited it — or in the case of religious buildings, the gods who dwelt therein.

Why am I talking about Schiaparelli? Because the most important item in The Girls of Slender Means is a Schiaparelli dress, and this is where, if you have not read the novel and you don’t want to hear spoilers, you need to stop reading.

[Go ahead, read the novel. It’s all right if you don’t have a London flat or a wildflower meadow. Neither are strictly necessary. The novel itself is quite short and can be read in one sitting, although you may wish to savor the language, the world of World War II London that it creates around you. If you would like a short foretaste of it, an appetizer, here’s how it starts:

“Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bomb-sites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity. Some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins of ancient castles until, at closer view, the wallpapers of various quite normal rooms would be visible, room above room, exposed, as on a stage, with one wall missing; sometimes a lavatory chain would dangle over nothing from a fourth- or fifth-floor ceiling; most of all staircases survived, like a new art-form, leading up and up to an unspecified destination that made unusual demands on the mind’s eye. All the nice people were poor: at least, that was a general axiom, the best of the rich being poor in spirit.”

Now that I have transcribed the above, I can see how Schiaparelli’s designs, and surrealism in general, came out of the interwar years. When you have seen this sort of destruction, which makes unusual demands on the mind’s eye, it must look absurd. It must look surreal.

Excuse me, I digress — although it’s not really a digression. More of a revelation. I have realized something English major-y about the thematic depths of the book. You clever writer, Muriel Spark! The Schiaparelli dress at the center of the book is just like those absurd staircases. Both are new art forms emerging in a time of war, responses to war itself — the response is to see destruction as absurd, and as art. And, next step, to turn it into something beautiful, like a couture gown. Or a novel. The Schiaparelli dress is like wartime London is like The Girls of Slender Means itself.

So, have you read the book yet? If not, go read it now . . . Don’t worry, I won’t start again without you.]

So, the novel is about a club, the May of Teck Club, across the street from Kensington Gardens, where young ladies on a modest income can live while they work in London. The novel starts with the news that Nicholas Farrington, a young man who used to frequent the club, and who was in love with the most glamorous member of the club, Selina Redwood, has died while serving as a missionary in Haiti. It seems there was an uprising — in part against the church — and he got mixed up in it, and was killed. (We get the sense that the Haitians were entirely justified.) When he lived in London, he was an aspiring poet: a man without regular occupation or income who sort of slouched about town, and eventually started coming to the club. Mostly to see Selina. The novel unfolds slowly, introducing us to all the women who live at the club as well as their gentlemen admirers, giving us a vivid picture of wartime London. It’s deliciously detailed and understated and witty, rather like a Schiaparelli gown.

The gown at the center of the narrative belongs to one of the girls, but all of them borrow it in turn for social events — all who can fit into it, that is. This is the first way slenderness becomes important in the novel. The second way is that in one bathroom, those girls who are slender enough can fit through a narrow window and slip out onto the roof, to sunbathe or get some cool air. The only other way onto the roof, a skylight, was boarded up some time ago, to keep gentlemen callers from climbing in at night — so, to safeguard the propriety of the club members. The slenderest girl in the club is of course Selina. She climbs in and out at will. On the roof is where she regularly meets Nicholas, who is only one of her many admirers.

The central question of the novel, never stated but always implied, is why did Nicholas Farrington, would-be poet, turn radical missionary? At the beginning of the novel, the May of Teck Club has fortunately escaped bombing in the Blitz — it still stands intact. But there is a rumor that a bomb fell in the garden and remains unexploded. At the denouement of the novel, Chekhov’s bomb explodes (sorry, writer joke there), and the club catches fire. The girls who live on the top floor are trapped by fire. Can they get out onto the roof and escape to the hotel next door? Those who are slender enough can. Those who are not, whose hips are the wrong circumference, are trapped inside and must wait for uncertain rescue.

Nicholas, who knows his way around that roof, helps as many girls as he can escape through the bathroom window — including Selina. During the tense wait for firefighters to arrive, break through the boarded-up skylight, and rescue the rest, Selina, whom he has already pulled out, slips back in. Why? A few minutes later, she appears again, slips past the girls waiting for rescue, slips through the window — there is something in her arms, something long and soft and drapey.

The Schiaparelli dress.

Most of the girls trapped inside are rescued. One, Joanna Childe, dies in the fire. She was the daughter of a clergyman. Nicholas meets with the clergyman when he comes to London to visit the place where his daughter died — of course, almost nothing is left of the May of Teck Club. Nicholas also tries to find Selina, but she has disappeared. He does finally locate her again and learns that she has gotten married. When she sees him, she starts screaming and screaming — she can’t stop. Some time after that, Nicholas Farrington goes to Haiti as a missionary and gets himself killed.

The novel doesn’t tell you what to think about all this. It shows you scenes in shorter or longer flashes. It gives you dialog. What do I think about it? I think that Muriel Spark is an expert at depicting a particular kind of evil, an evil that is not even aware of itself, like the deep selfishness of Selina Redwood, for whom other people do not quite exist. She shows us that under beauty and elegance, under an aesthetic surface, may lie a kind of corruption. I suppose that is why the dress is a Schiaparelli — because Elsa’s skeleton dress and tear dress, in particular, played with exposing what lies underneath.

What would I do with a Schiaparelli dress, if I had one? Sell it to a museum. I don’t go to the sorts of dinner parties where one wears Schiaparelli, and anyway, the dresses are works of art. They belong in museums. They were glorious to see, and I’m glad I had the opportunity, although my preferred environment is closer to that wildflower meadow where I read Muriel Spark with the bees buzzing around me.