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PARTISAN REVIEW
and her deep reticences and evasions in the aggregate. Among other
things, but centrally,
The Needle's Eye
is about parents and children,
mothers and children, Rose's determination
to
retain custody of her
own children, the conflict between her "ambition" to live as she
chooses and her ability to hang on
to
her children, and her ultimate
reconciliation with her husband because of the children. Additionally,
the novel is about morality, moral difficulty, virtue (Rose's middle
name is Vertue), souls, salvation, and the potentially corrosive, cor–
rupting nature of even professional and moral ambition. The passing
introduction of Eileen and her abandoned baby thus suggests a highly
overdetermined significance and mirrors, albeit freakishly, the pivotal
concerns of Rose's and Simon's own lives. Their conversational
dispatching of Eileen constitutes a stylistic gem, comparable in its
polysemy to the passage about meaningless labor from
The Realms of
Gold.
Yet the prose, the aggregate of signs that offers these possible
connections offers itself, its signs, rather than a serious investigation of
its referents. And, because Drabble so seduces with her illusion of
referents, she exposes herself to deep reproach for her failure to deliver:
reproach, that is, for the particular intellectual narcissism that plays
with meaning, promises meaning, offers communication and a serious
vision, and then retracts it, leaving only a particularly bright and
talented woman gazing at the mirror of her own virtuosity and,
presumably, like Louise, thanking God for being one of the chosen.
In
The Needle's Eye,
Simon thinks about his indomitable, driving
mother, who pushed and pulled herself and him out of the northern,
working-class mire from whence they originated. Her remarkable if
modest success story rested upon her writing and broadcasting about
her childhood, local strikes, and so forth-a part-time occupation that,
because of her uncanny psychological and commercial sense, had
mushroomed into a lucrative, full-time career.
He had never known what to think of her books and her broadcasts.
In a way they were ridiculous, they were sentimental to the last
degree, they could not possibly be taken seriously, and their follow–
ing was of middle-aged women like herself, who knew the worst and
wished to have it made acceptable to them. Her broadcasts-she
became a regular on regional Woman 's Hour-were about hardship,
done in a tone of smug palliation and petty domestic cheeriness in
the face of disaster: her public persona was one of cosy, cloying
domestic fortitude. They had seemed to him, as a child and a student,
to be composed of such lies that he was bitterly ashamed of her for
writing them: it was only recently that he had come to recognize their
relationship to reality, their relationship with a true transcendence of
hardship. The relation was not in the words, nor in the sentiments
expressed, but in the fact of expression. Somewhere between the
