James Wood scorches Margaret Drabble

 

Here's a book review James Wood wrote for the New York Times back in 1997:

The Witch of Exmoor 

By Margaret Drabble.

288 pp. New York:

Harcourt Brace & Company. $23.

Caricature in fiction is not always a failure; it may be a writer's way of sticking to the point. Dickens's caricatures are expanded essences. But even caricatures need vulgar plausibility. Margaret Drabble's new novel, ''The Witch of Exmoor,'' has a Dickensian interest in the state of the British nation. It is full of Drabble's hot, aggrieved, leftish politics. But her characters are dead caricatures. They are neither bluntly alive nor are they vivid blots concentrating a single idea. They are almost nonexistent. Drabble deals with her subjects as if they were nuisances, or mere variables in the experiment of her novel.

Drabble's idea of social fiction -- which has been hardening since the early 1980's -- seems to demand that characterization must be angry typology. Her new novel is thus a magazine of cliches. First we are introduced to a representative middle-class English family, the Palmers, and their various spouses and offspring. Drabble coats them with disdain. ''So there you have them,'' she apostrophizes. ''The middle classes of England. Is there any hope whatsoever, or any fear, that anything will change? Would any of them wish for change? Given a choice between anything more serious than decaffeinated coffee or herbal tea, would they dare to choose?''

Within this extended family, four types emerge. There is the greedy and conservative lawyer, Daniel Palmer. Again, Drabble has her own opinions. ''It is now considered correct to covet,'' she breaks in. ''And Daniel is covetous. . . . He is covetous, and he is mean. And he practices a profession, let us remember, in which base motives are more frequently encountered than fine motives.'' Nathan Herz, who is married to one of Daniel's two sisters, is a Jewish advertising executive. Much is made of his Jewishness, since Jews are types too. (Drabble tells us about ''the trading instincts of his ancestors,'' and so on.) Being in advertising, Nathan is cynical and slippery. Drabble dismisses him from her moral classroom by awarding his firm the job of updating ''the corporate image of the National Health Service.'' She comments: '' 'Update' is the word that is used: 'alter' is what is meant. It has become clearer, as we approach the end of the 20th century, that we cannot afford a National Health Service for everybody, all the time.''

Even when Drabble seems to confound caricature, her subversions are obedient to cliche. Her joker in this English pack is David D'Anger, a Guyanese aristocrat married to Daniel Palmer's other sister. David is the radical outsider, a sociologist and politician. ''He is an academic. He is a politician. He is a journalist. He appears on television. . . . He is the future,'' Drabble writes. D'Anger is an entirely predictable typological eccentric. (That Drabble intends him to be a predictable rebel isn't enough; her intention is itself predictable.) This tuneless quartet is completed by a mad old woman, Frieda Haxby Palmer, Daniel's mother, who is the witch of the novel's title. With only the scantest evidentiary backing, Drabble describes Frieda's descent into insanity (''She had come to hate the human race''). A Gothic plot scrambles, sending characters flying. Frieda secretes herself in a castle near the sea, where she eventually dies. Her will leaves her considerable wealth to David D'Anger's son, Benjamin. Everything goes wrong. The Palmer family quarrel. Several of them die in strange circumstances; the young heir becomes ill. Frieda's will has cursed the Palmers.

But Drabble's wild story has no purchase, because her book has no actual people in it. Coleridge said that Shakespeare's characters were always ''a class individualized.'' Drabble's are a class classified. At no time in the book does it occur to the reader that the Palmers are anything but serfs to Drabble's blowing whims. Of course, it hardly helps that Drabble treats them like criminals on authorial probation. For many years she has been fond of intruding, as author, into her scenes. Here she cuts in on her characters, checks them in and out and tethers them to her hostility. She delights in telling us about the Palmers' hidden awfulness, their racism and greed: ''This is not how the Palmers and the Herzes spoke -- not at all, not at all -- but I am sorry to say that it is what they thought.'' She doesn't seem sorry at all. When she is not doing this, she issues dead summations, which sliver her characters into two narrow dimensions: Nathan, for instance, is ''short and squat and fat and hairy and balding and very ugly.''

There is something puritanical in Drabble's unwillingness to grant her subjects any freedom, as if they must all be put into the stocks of fictional predestination and pelted with adjectives. Perhaps this is a political puritanism. For the freest character in ''The Witch of Exmoor'' is Drabble's incoherent, austere politics; this character, at least, she allows a little unpredictable life. Somewhat anachronistically, Drabble uses her novel to attack Margaret Thatcher's legacy -- a country Americanized by superstores, by ''ring roads and beefburgers,'' fast food and mass travel. The novel feels uncontrolled in its rage. No aspect of contemporary Britain escapes the swivel eye of Drabble's promiscuous revulsion. Abattoirs, Britain's so-called ''Heritage Industry,'' the judiciary, even literary critics, are all gobbled up, like insects in the path of a famished bat.

For a moment, this wildness threatens to save the novel; one rather cherishes its broken singularity, as one might a defective toy. But not for long. After all, this is hardly the first time that we have come across a system ''which has decreed that some should be nonexecutive directors of companies on vast salaries, while others should teach small infants or drive long-distance lorries or wipe the tables in the service stations of the land. It is all a mystery.'' Or worse: ''The rich are different from us. And in the last decade, they have become more and more different. The rich have got richer and richer.''

Banality is forgivable. But Drabble manages the paradox of complacent anger, which is not. Both of Drabble's obvious influences, Dickens and Woolf, wrote sharp political satire, the price of which was a certain amount of caricature. Woolf's novel ''Mrs. Dalloway'' attempts a kind of fictional dissolution of Parliament; she pulls apart the English Establishment, and offers quick, slapping portraits of its most oppressive members (a sinister psychiatrist, a ridiculous painter, pompous Members of Parliament). Drabble lacks the energy of these two writers. More important, she has none of their coherent restlessness. Drabble's novel certainly has a restless surface, but like someone fidgeting in a chair, it is restless in the same place. Woolf did burlesque the Establishment, but Woolf is self-doubting, as Clarissa Dalloway is, caught between reverence and disdain for her country.

Drabble, on the other hand, flails around but never in the direction of self- doubt. Woolf hoped that patriarchal England would change. Drabble does not believe that her characters will ever change. As she writes of them: ''They are all of them already, irrevocably, halfway up to their necks in the mud of the past of their own lives. Not even a mechanical digger could get them out alive now. There are no choices.'' The novel makes clear that Drabble does not only mean her characters' personal pasts; she means their collective past. England has done them in. There are no choices in Drabble's world, and thus no real politics.

In the end, this book gives off an unwitting pathos, because it seems to represent a genuine confusion about how to write fiction at the end of the century. Drabble's suffocating intrusions, her tossed plot, her disregard for character or plausibility or coherence, suggest the agitation of a sensibility that has missed an important appointment and is madly waiting for something to happen. In her frustration, Drabble is hardly alone. No novelist of penetration is really content, any longer, with the punctuation of traditional realism. Drabble's sister, A. S. Byatt, writes in a style not dissimilar to Drabble's, which she calls ''self-conscious realism.'' (It is both too self-conscious and not real enough.) More acutely, English fiction since the war has veered uncomfortably between coarse social satire and narrow estheticism; between bastard versions of Dickens and Woolf, respectively. One can see that Drabble might find her inheritance a burden and be tempted into a homemade anarchy. But she seems to feel that having come to the end of the line she can merely fret at the terminus.