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PARTISAN REVIEW
and friends; Emma, of
The Garrick Year,
is already married and coping
with two children, her husband, and her first affair; Rosamund, of
The
Millstone (Thank You All Very Much,
in the American edition), is
completing a dissertation and bearing an illegitimate child; Clara, of
Jerusalem the Golden,
is finishing a degree, trying to shake off her past
(mother and town), and having her first affair; Jane, of
The Waterfall,
is coping with young motherhood and a distintegrated marriage,
enjoying her first adultery and orgasm; Rose, of
The Needle's Eye,
is
fighting with her husband over the custody of their children and
eventually will reconcile with him, for them; and Frances, of
The
Realms of Gold,
having made it out of the domestic morass, is trying to
consolidate true love.
The novels constitute dimensions of a female life, by no means
fully identical to Drabble's own. More and more, they also constitute a
running commentary, not so much on contemporary life, as on the
trendy, shared representations of that life. Like a cheery and talented
magpie, Drabble collects the latest themes: families and anthropology
in
The Realms of Gold;
families, property speculation, and inflation
in
The Ice Age;
and-predictably enough-health in the novel now in
process. The quasi-photographic aspect of Drabble's technique, with
its rigorous refusal of interpretation and causation, helps to account
for the ambiguous and mirroring quality of her pictures of female and
social being. Like Jane in
The Waterfall,
she registers the lack of an
encompassing meaning. But, in accepting the erosion of absolute
standards by which
to
judge or to condemn behavior, in this instance
adultery, she rashly espouses a phenomenological personalism. The
events of the novel themselves seem
to
pass judgment on the transgres–
sion: Jane and James embarking on an illicit, lie-based vacation, with
her two children along, with Jane passing as her cousin Lucy, James'
wife, have a terrible accident which leaves James unconscious and
severely wounded. Judgment? Not at all. The accident was an accident.
Presumably, a pure accident can be an act of God, but, if such, it was
unmediated by the normal texture of meaning and prohibition.
Thus Frances, reflecting in
The Realms of Gold
on the simulta–
neous discovery of her Aunt Con's gruesome death and her nephew
Stephen's disappearance, decides for coincidence, not connection.
Drabble frequently insists on accident as a factor in plot. The point is
the repudiation of cause and seems decisively related to her attitude to
Freud. Let others read in judgment, should they so choose. Drabble
rests her case on coincidence of act (adultery) and event (accident). That
coincidence does not, however, stand naked. On one side, Drabble
