September 29, 2023

Rereading The Millstone

My official origin story as a Margaret Drabble devotee begins with the battered paperback copy of The Radiant Way I picked up from an Osaka bookshop back in in 2004, and fell in love with, and how I spend the new couple of years reading through her entire backlist (as well as new releases like The Sea Lady, The Red Queen, and The Dark Flood Rises). In 2020, I ventured to go back and reread all her novels in order, but the plan fast sputtered out because earliest Drabble was never my favourite anyway—I found the preoccupations of her characters terribly unfashionable, or perhaps it was just my ancient Penguin paperbacks. I reread the first two and then no more, until I partook to reread The Radiant Way again last winter, and found the reading experience just as glorious as it as twenty years ago (and the book somehow even more timely). And then, not long after, I reread A Natural Curiosity, which I didn’t love as much, but that was a high bar, and now I’ve gone and just reread Drabble’s third novel, The Millstone, after listening to a discussion about it on the Backlisted podcast, and now I want to get to Jerusalem the Golden next, so it seems I’m rereading them these books after all, just a little bit out of order.

My TRUE origin story as a Margaret Drabble devotee is a little bit different from that, however, as Drabble’s The Millstone was actually the first Drabble I ever read, before I even knew what a Margaret Drabble was. I even vividly recall reading it in late December 2001, the week between Christmas and New Year, back at my student apartment in Toronto, which was quiet because my roommates had not returned from their holidays. My elderly paperback (more about that in a moment) purchased for $3.00 at a secondhand store (likely Eliot’s on Yonge Street) because “Margaret Drabble” was a name I vaguely recognized, and because I’d started to realize how I’d wasted all my idle time in my undergraduate years reading writers called Thomas, and D.H., and F. Scott, and Ernest (and Morley and Robertson), and (apart from two ubiquitous Canadian examples) almost nobody with a name like “Margaret” at all.

And I am not sure that anybody has ever missed the point of a novel at all as I missed the point of The Millstone in 2001, but I am refusing to take full responsibility for this, and perhaps you’ll agree that I shouldn’t when I tell you about the particular edition of the novel I was reading, which wasn’t called The Millstone, or even A Touch of Love (which had been the title of the film based on the novel), but instead Thank You All Very Much, which had been the US title of the film, and the cover is atrocious, depicting nothing like anything that happens in the novel at all (and I actually I think that all of these titles are terrible).

The cover wasn’t even the worst of it though, instead the back cover copy, which I’ve pasted below. Clearly, someone else HAD missed the point of this novel as much as I had, which was whoever was employed to write the jacket copy. Clearly they didn’t quite know how to market this book, first published in 1965, about a young intellectual woman who becomes pregnant and opts to raise her child, to find herself and her place as a woman in society as a mother (but, most essentially, as nobody’s wife). But here’s how they put it on the back of my book, all of which describes the first 5 or so pages of the book, and no more, and also seems to be about another character altogether:

The Reluctant Virgin
Rosamund was a very now girl. She liked Fellini movies, underground novels, and more than one boyfriend at a time. Yet she was guilty of the most unpardonable twentieth-century sin: virginity.
Something had to be done.
But the more she didn’t do it, the more she read and heard about how she ought to do it. And when she finally did do it…she got caught.

So can you blame more for finding this novel remarkably unfashionable? A bit weird? What is my fault, however, is that I never made the connection that the only reason this whole plot takes place at all (and seems so old fashioned) is because it’s set in the 1960s, when abortion was illegal in Britain. Along similar lines, when I ended up pregnant by accident myself just a handful of months later (which I hadn’t seen coming in December, the tail end of a long era in which I’d be quizzed about sexual partners while donating blood, and just laugh and laugh) and had an abortion, it never occurred me that it hadn’t even been fifteen years since Canadian women had gained the right to abortion access. I was still very young, and to come of age in the 1990s in the western world was to see one’s own experience as outside of history.

I also think that I was too young and unschooled/earnest to realize just how funny this novel was, how ironic. Lines like, “My attempts at anything other than my work have always been abortive. My attempt at abortion, for instance, must be a quite classic illustration of something: of myself, if of nothing else.” Rosamund buys a bottle of gin with the plan to drink it to end her pregnancy, but then her friends come over and drink it all, and then (a bit drunk) she elects to take a very hot bath, but the gas heater didn’t work properly and she couldn’t get the temperature right, and the water ends up being freezing. Maybe I just didn’t go in for abortion humour in quite the same way in 2001.

I was also too young to fully get the meaning of a paragraph like this (and Drabble’s sentences are hard to parse! There are some parts I still don’t understand right now: “At times I had a vague and complicated sense that this pregnancy had been sent to me in order to reveal to me a scheme of things totally different from the scheme which I inhabited, totally removed from academic enthusiasms, social consciousness, etiolated undefined emotional connections, and the exercise of free will. It was as though for too long I had been living in one way, on one plane, and the way I had ignored had been forced thus abruptly and violently to assert itself. Really, it was a question of free will; up to this point in my life I had always had the illusion at least of choice and now for the first time I seemed to become aware of the operation of forces not totally explicable, and not therefore necessarily blinder, smaller, less kind or more ignorant than myself.”

The Millstone is not “old fashioned” (though the cover and copy surely are!), but instead a literary artifact of a particular moment in history, and a very social kind of novel too about class and gender, and the lives of educated women, and socialized medicine, and learning that one possesses a body, that one is a woman after all, and what that means, and all the other people such a distinction connects one to. (It’s also a terrifically funny novel about the literary scene, onto which Rosamund is an observer, as several of her friends are novelists, and the petty rivalries of that scene rang very true for me and made me feel better about my own plentiful foibles and insecurities.) I also now see that this book is beginning of my very favourite part of the Drabble canon, which is women who revel in the chaos of motherhood but who aren’t wives—Rosamund is a foremother of Liz Headleand and Kate Armstrong for sure. I also love that there are whole passages on jigsaw puzzles, which Rosamund takes up to pass the time and calm her brain, which I wouldn’t have noticed when I read this book in 2001, but Margaret Drabble hadn’t written her jigsaw puzzle memoir The Pattern in the Carpet then.

Though I must have reread this book at least once before, an experience of which I have no memory, and—unlike in 2001—there is no date on the inside page, but there instead a conspicuous bracket on page 97, on which Rosamund considers how—as an unmarried mother—nobody ever dares to say to her, “I bet you wouldn’t be without her now.” A paragraph that would have sang to me after my first child was born, words that reflected my truth: “And in many ways I thought that I would prefer to be without her, as one might reasonably prefer to lack beauty, or intelligence or riches or any other such sources of mixed blessing and pain. Things about live with a baby drove me into frenzies of weeping several times a week, and not only having milk on my clean jerseys. As so often in life, it was impossible to choose, even theoretically, between advantage and disadvantage, between profit and loss: I was up quite unmistakably against No Choice.”

Not old fashioned at all, I suppose, but instead a message from my future!

January 10, 2023

The Radiant Way, Again.

The case against rereading The Radiant Way, by Margaret Drabble, was that my copy was a battered paperback with a tiny faded font, the cover stuck on with Scotch tape, that the novel was nearly 400 pages long, and that my ambition to reread Drabble’s entire ouvre in order a few years back had fizzled into nothing. That I’d just spent an entire fortnight on holiday reading one splendid back list book after another, and perhaps this one wouldn’t measure up. That I have a small mountain of brand new books to be read and if I fail to tackle it, the pile could possibly overwhelm me.

The case for it, however: that this was, perhaps, one of the most pivotal novels of my life. A novel that helped me come into my own as a reader and to begin to come into my own as a writer, after years of having my reading selections determined by course lists and ideas about what the classics were. In 2004, I picked up The Radiant Way in a Japanese bookshop (Wantage Books in Kobe, though there is a stamp for something called Juso Academy Used English Bookstore on the inside cover), the first Margaret Drabble novel I’d ever read, and I fell in love with this work, and decided that this was kind of book I’d like to read and write forever. And yes, in 2020, I’d decided to read through all her novels again (I have them all—secondhand copies until The Red Queen, at which point I began to read her as new hardbacks instead of battered old Penguins) but it never worked out. The early Margaret Drabbles were never so resonant for me anyway, too dated by the time I read them, preoccupied by once-provocative ideas that had ceased to be so. Too fixed in the first person, shallow in their grasp—but then perhaps I was expecting too much from novels written by someone in their early 20s more than 60 years ago.

I preferred Drabble’s novels published in the 1970s to the early ones anyway, but 1987’s The Radiant Way was where it really starts for me, possibly because it’s where it DID start for me. And I wanted to read it again, to see if it would measure up to my first experience of it almost twenty years ago when I was twenty-five and on the cusp of so many things, idealistic and yet disbelieving that real life could ever happen. When I didn’t know the stakes of things.

So I picked it up. And then closed it—the tape! That font! And then I opened it again, and started reading: “New Year’s Eve, and the end of a decade. A portentous moment, for those who pay attention to portents.” And I do pay attention to portents, so kept reading, supposing this a most fitting book for early January, and immediately captured by the incredible omniscience of this story, and the Dalloway-esque preparations for the Headleand’s New Year’s Party, except that Liz is hardly going to buy the flowers herself. Wife, mother of five, prominent psychiatrist to the upper classes—she is far too busy for that.

And that was it, I was hooked, and I read this book with butterflies in my stomach, as giddy as the first time I’d ever picked it up, moved because everything I’d loved so much about it twenty years ago was still remarkable—that omniscience, the novel’s consciousness of its form, the playfulness, postmodernism, the blurry line between fact and fiction (there is a part about the advent of a new political party which “also attracted the support of a good many of the characters in, and potential readers of, this novel…”), how Drabble is attempting to use the novel as a container for society, for the universe:

“Liz, Esther, and Alix were talking, with much animation and many an apparent non sequitur, about London districts, property prices, houses, the police, no-go areas, rape, violence, murder, robbery, Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf… There was, perhaps, a thread linking this rambling, discursive, allusive, exclusive, jumbled topographical discourse…”

But even more remarkable was what I hadn’t noticed the first time—the attendance of characters at the Headleand’s party, for instance, who appear in previous Drabble novels, which I hadn’t yet read in 2004. I was reading this time too as a contemporary of the three protagonists, Liz, Alix and Esther, friends from Cambridge who’d found themselves in very different milieus by middle age, whereas before I’d been twenty years younger—and this is very much a novel about middle age, about middle grounds (Alix, a longtime socialist who’s now disillusioned, wonders if “making up one’s mind involves internalizing lies.)

Mostly, what blew my mind about rereading The Radiant Way was how familiar it all was, and not just because I’ve finally become the age its characters are. But instead how much England in 1980 feels like here and now, the same preoccupations, fears and instability. Rising inflation, right-wing governments, people losing their faith in any wing governments, labour unrest, budget cuts, a sense that the old ways and allegiances don’t apply anymore, disruptive technologies, how the working people pay for this change while the wealthy profit. Crime rates, an obsession with crime rates, and grisly murders, and an unwillingness to address the causes of such crime, and (for the labour types) to address just how difficult people can be—Tories are bad, but also (“wanted, idle, pointless, awful”) people wreck stuff just because they can. The tension between notions of the individual and society, which becomes especially fraught in the Thatcher years and and is so again in our current age of a new-new-Right (“What I can’t see, said Esther to Alix, is what any of this has got to do with you. Or with me. It’s simply not our problem. We didn’t make it, and that’s that. I’ve never met a miner, and I’m sure a miner wouldn’t want to meet me./ It’s not as simple as that, said Alix.)

A book full of questions that we’ve still not yet begun to answer…and yet it gives me some comfort to know that it was ever thus?

Anyway, I absolutely couldn’t get enough of this timely, artful, remarkable novel…but thankfully Drabble followed it up with two more books to make a trilogy, and I’ll be rereading both of these soon.

May 21, 2020

A Summer Birdcage, by Margaret Drabble

I started reading Margaret Drabble in 2004 when I bought The Radiant Way from a used bookstore in Kobe, and I don’t remember why I picked up the book, or if I’d known anything about Margaret Drabble before I did, but I became obsessed with that novel, and the wonderful thing about reading Margaret Drabble in 2004 (even in Japan) was that she had 14 other books I could read after that, many of them readily available in tattered paperback. And so I read them, mostly her 1970s’ novels, which I also loved, but which have blended together, stories of single mothers in London, stories that led directly to The Radiant Way where Drabble’s vision moved from the individual to society, which was pressing in the age of Margaret Thatcher, no matter what Margaret Thatcher thought.

The 1970s novels are fat and the books only got fatter (the final book in The Radiant Way trilogy is huge, and Drabble’s vision has expanded so much more that it’s all about Cambodia now). I was not able to read the more recent books (1990s on…) until I’d returned to Canada, and so most of my later Drabbles are not weirdly stained paperbacks, and I’m a little bit sorry about that.

Her 1960s books, however, compared with the next decade’s, are slim, with those distinctive orange Penguin spines (and many of their covers, oddly, feature Drabble’s own face, which is weird for a novel—but more about that in a moment) and they were never my favourite. Some of those reads that were blessedly short, but I don’t recall enjoying them. They didn’t resonate, and the theory I came up with about that was that they were very fashionable and of their time…which meant they were certainly not timeless.

And so when I decided that I was going to reread all the fiction Margaret Drabble had ever published (what better way to measure out these days, I guess?), her earliest books were what I was most intrigued about, the gap in my Drabble knowledge most need of filling. And, blessedly, they were short, at least.

So I started (naturally) with her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, published in 1963, a book whose only detail I could recall was that there was a whole lot about coming down from and going up to Oxford, which I always found confusing. And what I realized upon rereading it again was that a) it still wasn’t really my cup of tea but also b) its use of words I kept having to look up in the dictionary had perhaps kept me from understanding that this book was meant to be relatable.

A young woman, Sarah, just out of school (down from Oxford, natch) who has come back from a sojourn in Paris to be a bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding, her sister who is marrying the celebrated novelist Stephen Halifax, and no one really can understand why. Sarah has a boyfriend herself, but he’s away studying in America, and she meets with friends who’d married just out of school, and it’s all gone a bit wrong, Bohemian husbands expecting wives to cook them dinner on a nonexistent grocery budget. 1963: it was such a long time ago. This was even before the Beatles.

But also this story of being single in the city, weddings and bridesmaids: this is chick-lit, Bridget Jones diary, I wrote in a DM to a friend, and I didn’t mean it in a bad way. But I felt guilty too, because this novel is bending over backward to be exceedingly literary, which is partly why it’s so annoying—it never just out and says what it means, instead gestures vaguely, and I had a hard time discerning the point. Whereas the parts that were supposed to be obscure (whatever was going on between the bride and the best man) was obvious at the outset.

What would young Margaret Drabble think—aged twenty four, and married “since 1960,” it reads, curiously, in her author bio—about the comparison to Helen Fielding?

And here I return to the books with Drabble’s not exactly glamorous face on the cover—I think she was a famous young thing, married to her actor husband, and her personality was very much used to market these books, the same way that women authors complain of today. So we’re really not so apart from Bridget et. al after all…

And now I’m doing it too, reading fiction as biography, when I decide the key to the thing is the line where Sarah confesses, “Beyond anything I’d like to write a funny book. I’d like to write a book like Kingsley Amis, I’d like to write a book like Lucky Jim. I’d give the world to be able to write a book like that.”

But Lucky Jim, if Jim were a woman, would be decidedly chick-lit, slight and commercial, and I’ve always thought that—so my comparison to Bridget feels justified. Moreover the mention of Amis suggests that young Ms. Drabble is writing in the shadow of fashionable male authors, instead of firmly in her own vision, which would explain why this book is just slightly out of focus, doesn’t land perfectly, the way her later books do when Drabble isn’t trying to write like anyone but herself.

And I think this book actually is funny, but the humour doesn’t land right either, because of the way she so particularly captures a moment—between the 1950s and the 1960s, with the advent of feminism—that really was only a moment, before a cultural revolution came along and reshaped the landscape, in a way that Drabble would document in her later novels. So that what she captured here is hard for me to understand so many years after the fact, plus, yes, she is also writing about a very specific social milieu, and maybe she nailed it, but all these years later it’s hard to tell.

May 22, 2018

Mitzi Bytes and Margaret Drabble

This essay is exceedingly whiny, but makes a point worth underlining, which is “The book industry is partly kept afloat by a shadow economy in which the main currency is bullshit.” It’s true. For example, I could tell you how my Mother’s Day present was a road trip to Furby House Books in Port Hope (which is such a wonderful place!) and how I arrived to find Mitzi Bytes on their Staff Picks shelf like that was ain’t no thang. But it was a thang. Plus, and most importantly, they knew I was coming, which was undoubtedly how a book that’s three seasons old ended up there. Also it is a very good book, and I’ve been grateful for Furby House’s support of it since its released, but still. A shot of my book on the staff picks shelf (now autographed—there’s even a sticker!) does not count as full disclosure. There’s always more of the story to tell, and even the best bits are difficult to appreciate when and if they finally happen. It’s like that line from a Bob Dylan song, “What looks large from a distance close up ain’t never that big.”

Not everything needs to be big though in order to be appreciated. I think the key to keeping going in a creative career, in any career, is to pay attention to the small things, to mark your milestones, to not write off any of the tiny miracles it would be so simple just to take for granted. Like the photo above, a photo of Mitzi Bytes on the shelf at Furby House Books. In such excellent company—what a thing to share shelf space with the likes of these books. What spectacular company, basically everything I ever wanted and everything that I never quite dared to believe could come true. But there is one title in particular that stands out here, the reason I took this photo in the first place. That yellow book on the lower shelf, far right: Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises (which I loved, remember?). Margaret Drabble who made me want to write novels like no one else ever has—the first book of hers I read was The Radiant Way, which I discovered when I was still young enough to be impressionable but old enough to get it. (Rohan Maitzen just wrote a great post on the book, although she did not love it as I do.) I remember reading her books for the first time like I was discovering the world—but I was also discussing the limits of my talents and abilities and the hugeness of ambition at the very same time. It was a lot to comprehend. And so to see my book alongside hers years later is almost too incredible to be properly understood. It sounds overstated, but it isn’t. If someone had told me years ago that this photo was a thing that could possibly happen, even with the main currency of the book industry being bullshit, I would have considered this success beyond my wildest dreams.

My point being that sometimes it’s possible to arrive; it’s just the trick of remembering to notice once you get there.

April 25, 2017

The Dark Flood Rises, by Margaret Drabble

I’ve spent the last week reading Margaret Drabble’s new novel The Dark Flood Rises, an experience that is the closest I’ve ever come to reading Drabble for the very first time, The Radiant Way in 2004. Which has been weird, because reading that book was the most visceral experience, a book that read like butterflies in my stomach. I still remember. Although it was possibly because my life was on the edge of everything in 2004: about to get married, return to Canada, enrol in graduate school. I was 25, and everything amazing lay just before me. There I was looking out at the world, and The Radiant Way was exactly like that: I want to be there, I remember thinking, intellectuals and Oxford grads, cultural critics and North London. The way she wrote the world: I want to do that too, her work affirmed for me. Her amazing omniscience, and the remarkable body of her knowledge—inspiring but overwhelming, because I could never do that. But she made me want to reach. For me, discovering The Radiant Way in a  second-hand bookshop in Kobe was the discovery of literature proper.

It was also exciting because even in 2004, Margaret Drabble had a huge body of work behind her, and she was sufficiently unfashionable that her books was always readily available in used bookshops, even the Japanese ones. I spent our year in Japan buying up orange-spined Penguin paperbacks and reading wildly. We coined the verb “Drabbling,” which meant to be reading and utterly enraptured. I enjoyed her early works, though I found her books before The Needle’s Eye interested me less—these books were about individuals, but it was her engagement with society that so fascinated me. I insisted on sending all of the books home by sea, which was stupid because battered secondhand Margaret Drabble novels are hardly rare, but I am glad I did so. And I began to discover her newer work when we got back to England—I bought The Peppered Moth from an Oxfam bookshop in Notting Hill.

For awhile, it seemed like Margaret Drabble novels were an infinite resource. She had new books out in 2005 and 2006, and I still wasn’t through with her backlist. I began to see that with her works in the 1990s and 2000s, she was less interested in society than the novel itself, at pushing the limits at what a book could contain. With The Witch of Exmoor and onward, her books began to get rather curious. I didn’t love them as much (by which I mean to the point of intoxication) but Drabblers takes whatever Drabble they can get. They were never ordinary or boring. With the publication of her memoir The Pattern in the Carpet in 2009 (which I read two weeks before Harriet was born—there’s always a Margaret Drabble book when I’m on the edge of something) she declared herself retired from writing fiction, but thankfully she was lying. The Pure Gold Baby appeared in 2013, which was a Drabble throwback, a reimagining of her preoccupations from her early works.

And now The Dark Flood Rises, which is also nostalgic in approach, another book about people and connections, her fabulous omniscience. Esther Breuer from The Radiant Way trilogy appears in this book, there are towers and ariel views as with The Middle Ground, the same fatalism that permeates so much of Drabble’s work. (I started reading Margaret Drabble at the same time I started reading Joan Didion. They are not similar stylists, except for that fatalism, which so links them in my mind.) It’s a book about old age and death, but the ways in which it probes the interestingness of these scenarios makes it a very compelling novel. At it’s centre is Francesca Stubbs, who works for  a trust charged with innovating care homes for the elderly, and she tours around England in her car and appreciating the comforts and familiarity of basic hotels. We meet her children, her son Christopher, an unemployed TV interviewer whose partner has just died after an illness in the Canary Islands, and her daughter Poppet, an environmentalist who lives in a cottage on a flood plain. Her friends too who are marking old age in their own distinctive ways. She brings dinner to her bedridden ex-husband, who is engaged in relations with his private nurse, a Zimbabwean called Persephone. The narrative ruminates on islands, and migrants, environmental catastrophe. On books and art and cellars and histories. Archives. This is a novel that, like another referred to in the narrative, is written “in a state of uncertainty… a modernist open-ended novel… on the edge of history.”

The Dark Flood Rises is vastly different from Ali Smith’s Autumn in every way, but similar in its edge of history-ness, uncertainty, and that both books refer to artist Pauline Boty. And it was interesting to be reading it last week when I learned that Drabble’s adult daughter had died last week after a short illness, underlining the entire project with a layer of sadness. Parts of it seem ominous now, and it made me feel Drabble’s grief in a way that could have been more theoretical otherwise. But this has always been the case with my feelings for her work, how its ideas refuse to stay confined to the text, how it seems impossible that the worlds she creates aren’t actually real, how the story seems to creep its way into the world, the culture, like vines so, until the lines between them become difficult to decipher, and it’s impossible to tell where one stops and another begins.

November 5, 2013

Margaret Drabble at IFOA

The seed of Margaret Drabble’s 18th novel The Pure Gold Baby was planted years ago during a trip to Zambia, Drabble explained to interviewer Eleanor Wachtel during her appearance at the International Festival of Authors on Saturday afternoon. Zambia, she described as “a beautiful golden country”, and countered that Africa was in fact “the heart of sunlight”. It was impression that stayed with her through decades, though was so apart from the rest of her life that she wasn’t sure how she’d ever use it in her fiction. Even still, the Zambian landscape “became part of the hinterland of my thinking.”

Drabble would return to Zambia years later, “in search of an ending,” she says, for The Pure Gold Baby. Or not an ending exactly, she clarified, but a sense of resolution. The novel isn’t spoiled for knowledge of this Zambian return, which mirrors its introduction, in which anthropologist Jessica Speight observes a group of children playing by the side of a lake, the fingers on their hands fused together in a deformity that resembles lobster claws. The Pure Gold Baby, Drabble says, is not a novel of revelations.

She had seen these same children herself, and was struck by them, by their indifference to their disability, “imperfect children having a perfect time.” Eventually, as her narrator does, and not until years later, she was able to trace her fascination with these children to a childhood friend whose hands had been disfigured after an accident. This connection said something to her about “the mysterious workings of the memory.”

This is vintage Drabble, the broad treatment of history, fascinating with anthropology, autobiographical elements, this story of a young single mother in 1960s’ London. Though underlying the story is that of David Livingston, the famous British missionary to Africa who only ever managed one convert. He was just as successful in his quest to find the true source of the Nile, dying nowhere near where he wanted to be because he was going the wrong way. Drabble was intrigued by his misplaced journeys, this story of life’s alternate directions, of where you end up when you’re going the wrong way, and she wanted his journeys to underlie Jess’s story, though motherhood had put an end to her own actual travels.

This missionary’s story connects too to what Jess refers to as the unfashionability of Christianity during the 1970s. Jess in the novel and Drabble herself considers what system has replaced it. What system makes us behave better toward one another? A question to which neither Jess nor her author have an answer, except that we must strive for a culture that is less cruel.

“I don’t have opinions,” says Drabble. “I have reflections.”

The map has shifted, Drabble says, from the 1960s, from Jess’s time, in that we realize now how much is inherited. There was a focus on nurture instead of nature in that time, she says, which meant more responsibility and more blame (upon mothers in particular). Even in the most benign circumstances, she notes, we try to explain away our inheritances, the family members who note that such-and-such a trait certainly doesn’t come from our side.

There has been a shift too in how we treat those with disabilities, from institutionalized care to community-based solutions. Both options come with their drawbacks, and Drabble acknowledges that there is no perfect solution. There are advantages though, she explains, for having the disabled living among us, and she fears what would happen if a disability like Down Syndrome managed to be eradicated. Those with Down Syndrome show us, she says, a different way of being in the world, a sense of human nature that is without guile.

Wachtel suggested that Drabble was perhaps romanticizing the reality of disability, but Drabble is adamant that she knows such people, she has seen their example, and wouldn’t write about it if it were otherwise. These stories are common really; both in her book and in the interview, she cites examples of writers whose disabled family members were hidden away from the world–Jane Austen, Arthur Miller. And it was the uniqueness of her narrative structure allowed Drabble this bit of latitude in her book, enough distance for some literary gossip.

“And what about Doris Lessing?” Wachtel asks her, who also comes into the story. And at this, Drabble stops talking.

“Doris is still alive,” she says quietly. And so the conversation moves on.

The Pure Gold Baby was originally going to be told in the 3rd person, but instead a common group voice began to emerge. Drabble’s narrator is a chorus figure, but a participatory one rather than the Greek variety. Is her narrator reliable? Wachtel inquires, and Drabble replies that she is (they are) about Jess’s story, though she is curiously evasive about her own life. And any reader has the right to see it differently.

The narrator is Jess’s friend, part of a group of young mothers supporting one another in 1960s’ London. It was the kind of community that Drabble herself was part of at the time, and she remembers organizing a cooperative nursery school when her own kids were small. The attitude of the young moms, she says, was “Let’s help ourselves, because no one else is going to.” It was the era of Dr. Spock, and they all felt children knew best. “We were very permissive,” she says, “but we did like a bit of the evening for ourselves.”

These days, childcare is so much more expensive, motherhood itself has become professionalized. (“In the UK, we have something called Mumsnet,” she says. “I looked at it once and my computer broke down. Everybody was talking about penises.”)

Drabble has written about the 1970s before, but it is different to write about it now than when she was actually living it. Her approach to the time and its characters has become anthropological, she says. “I’m looking at small people in a faraway landscape. Now, it all seems long ago.”

Wachtel noted the Rodin sculpture that makes an appearance in The Pure Gold Baby, and Drabble admits her fascination with aging flesh. “And now we live forever and ever,” she says. “It’s almost unfortunate.” A discussion about death and downsizing leads to a mention of Drabble’s pronouncement in 2006 that she was retiring from fiction. She was wrong it seems, and it was during her previous visit to the IFOA in Toronto that she got the urge to return to fiction.

She says she is grateful for Toronto and the festival for providing space in her life in which her laptop started looking friendly again.

October 29, 2013

The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble

The Pure Gold Baby is Margaret Drabble’s first novel since 2006’s The Sea Lady, and her first book since the memoir The Pattern in the Carpet in 2009. Her first novel since she claimed to have quit writing fiction, with a new publisher after she claimed that Penguin was “dumbing her down”. It’s a novel that it’s impossible to regard outside of the wider context of Drabble’s oeuvre, which even the book itself makes implicit. Page 19 makes reference to “the radiant way” and “a millstone”, which suggest the titles of two earlier Drabble novels. Late in the book, a passage: “A wider view, an aerial view, an uplifting view, a view of the river, a view of time, a view of the shores of the infinite.” Which reminded me of a passage I underlined in The Middle Ground a long time ago: “…London, how could one ever be tired of it?… When there it lay, its old intensity restored, shining with invitation, all its shabby grime lost in perspective, imperceptible from this dizzy height, its connections clear, its pathways revealed. The city, the kingdom. The aerial view.”

One has to take an aerial view of Drabble’s career in order to make sense of The Pure Gold Baby. Because it’s a curious book, and all her books have been curious lately. But let’s start at the beginning, with her first books during the 1960s, usually about young educated women living and working in London. She was a very fashionable writer, the kind Barbara Pym judged herself against unfavourably during her own wilderness years. The fashionableness means these books are dated now, but they have literary merit. Drabble has always been prescient too about social trends–she wrote about single motherhood early in The Millstone, she anticipates the modern media-scape in A Natural Curiosity.

Her perspective broadened during the 1970s and 1980s, much concerned with both the domestic and with wider social trends. Her Radiant Way trilogy is the story of England, the story of everything, a time of great social turmoil and changes, documented in the lives of the characters she made so real.

Since the late 1990s, her books have become very unconventional, stretching the shape of the novel with remarkable elasticity to encompass such largeness: questions of time, genetics, globalization, history. With every book, one gets the sense that she is asking herself again just what the novel is capable of doing. I don’t think Drabble has the credit she deserves as an experimental novelist. She is far from content to write the same book over and over, and seems rather determined to reinvent the book every time, though her preoccupations remain constant.

The Pure Gold Baby reads like a culmination of sorts, the Drabble universe encapsulated. We have a single mother in 1960s’s London, but she takes these characters right up to present day, employing that aerial view, that stunning omniscience she started playing with in the middle of her career. And then the narrative strangeness t00–it’s puzzling. This is the story from the perspective of a woman who pieces together her friend’s history over decades, through stories she has heard, rumours, long and drawn out conversations. Why is she telling this story? We never really know–even she doesn’t know. What do we learn about her, this character who is only named once or twice. Why does she matter?

The centre of this story is Jessica Speight, an anthropologist who a gives birth to a daughter she raises on her own, the pure gold baby of the title. It eventually becomes clear that all is not as it should be with Anna, that she has some kind of unnamable developmental problem–she’s a bit clumsy, a bit simple. Her existence and her affliction come to shape the trajectory of her mother’s life, and here Drabble is pondering motherhood, its questions and problems. Though as ever, her interest is genetic. From where did Anna come from? Jess is not forthcoming with this information, and it causes our narrator to wonder, questions about errant genes.

Or is the origin something else, and here is where the story begins–with a group of children with malformed hands by the side of a lake in Africa where Jess had encountered them years before Anna was born. We’re returned to this point again and again, and Jess makes the voyage back to Africa near the end of the book. It’s kind of an inverse Heart of Darkness, as though Africa were the heart of light, the light that emanates from people like Anna, humanity at its most basic, simple. Which is a bit racist and also reductive in terms of regarding disability, but then whether this is a hypothesis or conclusion is never clear. This is the kind of novel in which characters are allowed to be wrong.

It’s such a strange novel: we are taken through the decades of a group of mothers in London and learn which marriages ended, which children succeeded, which others went wayward (and how there was no telling of who would be who). This is a novel about friendship, and how we tell each other stories, about how we become characters in the stories of one another’s lives. It’s about mental health, public health, institutions. It’s a novel full of facts, pages of passages that read like non-fiction. It’s about progress, and the illusion of progress.

Pure Gold Drabble, is what it is. And so naturally, I loved it.

 

October 22, 2013

Gift from the Sky

Donna Tartt’s new novel The Goldfinch came out today, and I’ve been looking forward to it. I remember when The Little Friend came out in 2002 and it was such an event. I was very broke, living on cans of tuna and long-life milk, sleeping on the bottom bunk of a bed in backpackers’s hostel in the Midlands. It seems momentous to be buying her new book all these years later, to measure out my own life by Donna Tartt releases: I own a couch now. The intervening decade has been good. So I trekked to the bookstore just now to pick it up, and also to get Kelli Deeth’s new collection The Other Side of Youth. (Read Deeth’s wonderful piece from yesterday about her devotion to the short story form).

So there I was at Book City, and in a hurry too because I had sweet potatoes in the oven, and what do I discover: Margaret Drabble has a new novel!! The Pure Gold Baby, just out at the beginning of this month. I had no idea! Can you believe it? The universe offering up one of my chiefest delights (to be reading a Margaret Drabble for the very first time) like it was nothing. And it’s even meant to be good, this book, and Meg Wolitzer says so. I am so excited. As if yesterday’s bookish gifts weren’t enough…

June 12, 2013

The benefits of being bedridden

“Charles can no longer pay attention to one source of information at a time. He is Modern Man, programmed to take in several story lines, several plots at once. He cannot quite unravel them, but he cannot do without the conflicting impulses, the desperate stimuli. Perhaps he hopes the alcohol will simplify them, will stick them together and fuse them all into one consecutive narrative. The narrative of his own life, of his place in the history and geography of the world.” –Margaret Drabble, A Natural Curiosity

“‘No,’ I answered. “I don’t agree with that. I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It’s hollow.” –e.l. konigsburg, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Isn’t Margaret Drabble’s 1989 novel eerily prescient of the internet? I enjoyed the konigsburg book as well, though it was a curious one. I’m now finishing reading Lisa Moore’s novel Caught, and will be rereading Slouching Towards Bethlehem afterwards. And I think I’m going to miss being bedridden… Other books in the horizon are The Eliot Girls and The Flamethrowers. And truly, this is the reason that breast is best.

May 27, 2013

Reading in the here and now.

I just finished rereading A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym, which I remember reading for the first time about 3.5 years ago in my room with the lighting so dim I could hardly see the words, and there was a little baby napping on my chest. Oh, is there anything worse than a little baby napping on your chest and then feeling a coughing spasm coming on? I remember that too. Of the many ways in which I’m in limbo at the moment, reading-wise is one. I have the new Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie novel waiting on my shelf, but it’s huge and I can’t make such a commitment to anything at the moment while I’m waiting for baby to begin to arrive. After baby comes, I will crack open Where’d You Go Bernadette, but I’m saving it ’till then. I reread Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin last weekend when I was sick. “What to read next?” is not usually a question I spend much time grappling with, as the books usually seem to be lined up for me, but not here and not now. Which is kind of lovely, a luxury–the only bit of this waiting in which I’m really revelling. And all I really want to do is reread. I think I’m going to pick up a Margaret Drabble next–the follow-up to The Radiant Way (my first and best Drabble…) which is A Natural Curiosity–I read it once the summer I got married. (I keep plucking these books off the shelf and they’re covered with dust.)

You might recall that my computer died in June 2009, with nothing on it backed up, including my list of Books Read Since 2006. Which means that I soon after started a new list, which is basically “Books I’ve Read Since Harriet’s Birth”. I updated it this evening–503 books read in my child’s lifetime. Not counting the hundreds and hundreds of books I’ve read to her.

And speaking of Barbara Pym, whom I am really anxious to reread all summer long, a fun online reading project will be taking place in celebration of her centenary on Sunday. Barbara Pym Reading Week runs from June 1-8, with giveaways and a virtual tea party even. Ideally, I’ll be lost in newbornhood by that point, or even pulling off my ultimate celebratory stunt (giving birth on the big day), but I think I may be rereading Excellent Women at some point in solidarity.

I do so love Pym, whose essence was Englishness, who knew much about nuance, psychology, tea, womanhood, longing and romance. But who perhaps knew less about motherhood, if this passage from A Glass of Blessings is anything to go by…

“We were in her bed-sitting-room after supper, and I had been telling her about Sybil’s forthcoming marriage and what an upheaval it was going to make in our lives.

‘Yes,’ said Mary, ‘marriage does do that, doens’t it?–and death too, of course.’

‘But not birth.”

‘No–people seem to come more quietly into the world…'”

Which is not exactly how I remember it. But maybe I remember it wrong?