Constricted Expectations

...1 am not convinced, though, that this shift is to Drabble's benefit...

...Stillness was useless, one had to keep walking...

...Hugo: "Did you send the spinach back...

...Meer, Evelyn's "ideal client" whose history is "one of awesome tragedy and immense fortitude...

...Somewhere amid the din of issues and the clatter of surfaces, too, there is a novela post-feminist novel, if you will-struggling to get out and describe how it is after the chips have fallen and we are left again with only ourselves, men and women, as different as alike...

...Every one of them emerges as a compendium of random physical details e.g., Kate's "pale bright-blue give-away impenetrable eyes"and personality traits that are asserted instead of demonstrated...

...the pity of it is that these are mostly obscured by the carelessness of the prose...

...Little...

...Her first few novels were perhaps a bit parochial in their concerns, yet they were well-crafted and managed at moments to transcend their own limits...

...Being a proper disciple of the Victorian notion of self as one link among the many chains that make up what George Eliot in Middlemarch called "the largeness of the world," Drabble swamps Kate with all manner of relationships...

...They chatter in that hard, bright way the English seem to have, at least in books...

...Sophie Glicksman, a young Jewish girl, yearns to get away from her impoverished, crowded home and dreary job at the local Y. She falls in love with a goy who is the swimming instructor there, mistaking his blue eyes and golden hair for an escape route to a better life...

...Billy takes his wife and baby on a visit to his family in Gait...

...Drabble drops this neo-Wildean banter with a thud on page 10 (never to return to it), and steps into her characteristic unpithy style, with its endless conditional clauses and pell-mell phrasing...

...She couldn't turn the sun into an article, she had no views on it at all...

...What do I fear to lose...

...Restless, enquiring, demanding an answer...

...Faessler is not a particularly beguiling writer and her characters are rarely charming...

...nor Hugo's beautiful, narcissistic mother...

...Kate: "No, of course not...

...Within three months she is pregnant and living together with Billy at her parents' house...

...Hugo shoots back: "That's a very unfeminist remark...

...The novel opens on a lunch Kate is having with her old friend, Hugo Mainwaring, a foreign correspondent who has recently lost an arm while covering a battlefield abroad...

...Women never send things back in restaurants, didn't you know...

...She had spent too much of her life turning things into articles, annexing them, distorting them, colouring them in with her own limited range of colours...

...Little's precocious brat of a son impregnates the cleaning girl and the landlady's eccentricities break out in full force...

...Its subject-that hiatus between the striving for and the arriving at, what we have come to refer to as "the mid-life crisis"-strikes me as remarkably ill-suited to a writer who has little patience with irresoluteness and tends to treat her characters' qualms briskly, as though they were the result of lax housekeeping...

...Every thing in the Window (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 331 pp., $11.95) is the first novel of Shirley Faessler, A Canadian writer of short-stories...

...A page later finds Kate dismissing Hugo's suggestions for a career-switch: "Don't be silly, Hugo...

...In contrast, her two novels prior to the latest one may have been determinedly far-flung, but what they gained in "scope" they lost in both the writing and in the creation of character...

...Burying her head in novels every free chance she gets, she continues to search for confirmation of her specialness, her belief in herself as destined for better things...

...I know my limitations...

...She possesses all of the 19th century's moral conviction and drive and none of the present century's self-consciousness in the face of Art...

...On page 13 what must be one of the most awkward transitional sentences in literature-Here is an account of Kate's past history, some if not all of which must have led her to wherever she now is"-brings us back to vintage Drabble country: the slow climb out of a grubby childhood into a classier adulthood via marriage, professional achievements, motherhood, and adultery...

...At home she is depressed by the squalor of her mother's housekeeping and the close quarters, and finally insists on moving elsewhere...

...Sophie is put off by their calm, cool ways and by "their inability to distinguish between her and any ordinary girl...

...An avid reader, Sophie names the daughter she gives birth to Emma, after Madame Bovary, the book she was reading in the last week of her pregnancy...

...Despite the admonition of her friend Ruby that "a Jewish boy makes a better husband," Sophie elopes with Billy James, who promises her "everything in the window...

...All goes well until Mrs...

...I don't know if Margaret Drabble means to endorse this view, but surely by now she ought to know that it takes greater courage to write well: Her work will only gain from it...

...Drabble, I think, would welcome-has endeavored, in fact, to create-the suggestion that there is something Victorian about her...

...I suspect that to get at it Drabble will have to become sterner with herself and her characters, for she is tolerant about all the wrong things: "The more I try to tell the truth," Hugo Mainwaring thinks to himself, "the worse I write...

...Billy takes rooms in the compulsively clean home of a Mrs...

...Sophie and Billy return to the Glicksmans, where Billy shudders whenever his mother-in-law goes near Emma, and Sophie cleans and irons and makes Billy separate non-kosher dinners...

...The experience of lassitude, that dulling of the spirits which makes it impossible to get up in the morning, is nearly absent from Drabble's novels: Her women have always given off an impression of unflagging onward-ness, and if they do actually pause for a few seconds to muse upon the whither and why, you can be sure they straighten themselves out in time to finish their work and get dinner on the table...

...Sophie's stepmother, a primitive, slovenly woman, cooks all her special dishes-gefulte fish, cholent, and cocletten-for her new son-in-law, "a beautiful boy, a diamond...

...They are distinct and grainy with life, however, and they rub against us as they strain away from their fates, leaving an indelible imprint...

...It is not surprising, for example, that the heroine of The Middle Ground, Kate Armstrong, a fashionable journalist who has tired of her own opinions, doesn't really have the lime to doubt herself: "Perhaps the sun shone so brightly to remind her that, whatever she thought of it, it was still there...

...But surely, at my age, I ought to have the courage to write badly...

...Still, floating around The Middle Ground are some interesting thoughts about the eclipse of private and political passions and the ultimate fixity of the natural order...

...There are Ted and Evelyn Stennett, the former a womanizing medical researcher whom Kate has had an affair with, the latter, a social-worker and practiced dinner-party hostess who guesses at Ted's liaisons while maintaining her friendship with Kate...

...The single Drabble novel that successfully merged her given skills and her larger aims was The Needle's Eye, which stands squarely halfway in her development...

...Should she attempt stillness...

...Everything in the Window is a raw, pitiless book...

...If she fell silent forever, it would continue to shine...

...nor Mrs...

...as such it is about types rather than individuals, easily-generalized issues rather than particular conflicts...

...Set in Toronto of the '30s, it possesses a dogged proletarian authenticity that takes some getting used to, but is finally compelling in its very fidelity to the locked-in quality of the lives portrayed...

...When these do arrive at lastin the shape of first one lover, an untalented but worldly painter, and then another, a gifted and handsome musician-Sophie finds her horizons, like Emma Bovary's, constricting instead of expanding...

...Sophie's father, a prickly, sensitive immigrant employed as a night watchman, is initially irate when he hears of his daughter's marriage to a Gentile, but is reconciled once Billy agrees to undergo circumcision and be remarried by a rabbi...

...There are Mujid, an Iraqi student who is staying in Kate's house, Kate's children and Evelyn's children, Hugo's grief-crazed wife, Judith, and Kate's "gruesomely neurotic" brother, Peter...

...With each novel she has paid less attention to the niceties of style and has focused more of her energy on depicting the social history of contemporary England...

...It recognizes the longing for romance-that advent of sweetness and light we are conditioned to imagine is our due-while suggesting quietly and implacably that fate does not necessarily accommodate the wide-eyed...

...Nor should we forget Kate's fat, sedentary mother and eccentric, sewage-obsessed father...

...She also has written a biography of Arnold Bennett and a book on Britain's literary landscape...

...The Middle Ground belongs very much to Drabble's later phase...

...There is her ex-husband, Stuart Armstrong, a painter who seems to have been used for his family connections and cultural sawiness and then dispatched...

...But no, how could one be still, she was an active person...

...But the dismal truth of the matter is that all of the characters in the book are forgettable...