"The Finishing School" is a thread-bare novella--a sketch, really--about jealousy and the creative process. Rowland Mahler and his wife, Nina, operate College Sunrise, a post-secondary school which moves from one European location to another, not merely for a change in ambience but mostly to outrun the school's piling debts. While Nina manages the school, Rowland is supposed to be writing his novel, but he's suffering from an intractable case of writer's block.To put it more accurately: "Rowland was simply going mad with jealousy about the writing of novels." One of the school's students, the handsome and popular Chris Wiley, is discovered writing his own book--a historical work about Mary, Queen of Scots. Soon enough, Chris's novel has attracted both the attention of several publishers and the murderous envy of Rowland, who whines that Chris is "trying to pass himself off as a creative writer, when all he's doing is exploiting his looks and his youth." And Chris, in turn, discovers that he is unable work on his book without the motivating presence of Rowland's jealousy.Added to this plot are a few random descriptions of the other students (and their familial backgrounds) and some generally blithe comments about society ("it's hypocrisy that makes the world go round"), etiquette ("if you are offered a plover's egg as a snack...you want your right hand to be free to shake someone else's hand [so] your left hand should hold the plover's egg"), and liberalism in education (Nina obliges when the students want "to be reminded of what an exam was like").The slightness of Spark's 23nd novel is more than compensated by the sharpness of its observations on creativity and competitiveness. Like other British comedies of manners, "The Finishing School" is slim of plot and of character; instead, it's a work to be savored for its conciseness, its cynicism, and its occasional mean-spiritedness.