Sometimes it seems that writers who can write can't tell a story and those who can tell a story can't write. Because of the unfortunate division in our century between high art and popular entertainment, there are few novels that are both well-crafted and immediately appealing. Our serious fiction is formally inventive and linguistically splendid, but it seldom compels the reader to read on. ("Lolita" is one of the few novels since World War II to possess this miraculous double appeal.) By contrast, our compulsively readable novels are so carelessly rendered and dully derivative that there is no reason to reread them, much less study and admire them.

Once in a while, however, a book comes along that is beautifully put together and effortlessly entertaining; Muriel Spark's "Territorial Rights" is such a novel. To declare it a great book would be to burden it with an ambition it...