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PARTISAN REVIEW
tions of capitalist society and of human interconnectedness reveals the
depth of Drabble's largely unconscious nihilism-the mirror image of
her heroines' narcissism.
The Realms of Gold,
against, one suspects, Drabble's conscious
intentions, captures this same interweaving of personal salvation and
fatuous social repudiation. Frances Wingate, archaeologist extraordi–
naire, divorcee, lover, offhanded mother of four, one of the greedy ones
to whom shall be given, asks herself "why she had become an archaeol–
ogist and what on earth it was she was trying to prove about the past."
Frances associates herself with her lover Karel, who studies eighteenth–
century agricultural history, speculating that "the pursuit of archaeol–
ogy ... like the pursuit of history, is for such as myself and Karel a
further attempt to prove the possibility of the future through the past.
We seek a utopia in the past, a possible if not an ideal society. We seek
golden worlds from which we are banished, they recede indefinitely, for
there never was a golden world, there was never anything but toil and
subsistence, cruelty and dullness." And reviewing in her mind her
ancestors' struggles with stony fields, her grandfather'S growing of
potatoes and tomatoes, her father's studying newts and becoming a
professor of zoology, an aggregate of labors that had opened the world
for herself, she bathes in her own comfort in those simple things, a
tumbler of brandy, a handy nylon jersey steaming dry on an electric
lamp, the knowledge that a breast lump had proved benign ("Even her
lumps were benign"), and the choice between two beds with clean
sheets in a single hotel room.
Frances's musing, as indeed Frances herself, captures the strength
and weakness of Drabble's novels. Frances is a fatuous, self-satisified
bitch; too good at everything by half, not to mention too rich and
unencumbered. Her unconvincing estrangement from her lover, her
tendency to drink slightly too much, her occasional bouts with a
hereditary depression (labelled as madness of a pre-Freudian type) fail
to disturb the complacent and utopian mirror she offers up to thirtyish,
educated, middle-class, female readers.
The Realms of Gold,
to be
sure, purports to explore a good deal more than Frances: but the novel
unfolds in one long sustained discourse from Frances alone in a hotel
room in an unnamed city somewhere in Europe to Frances reunited
with Karel.
The flow of words is less a story than an archaeology or anthropol–
ogy of family life. Drabble offers us a diorama of the nineteen–
seventies-a diorama fit for the museums of succeeding generations
and explicitly equated to Roman relics and bits of agricultural machin-
