The middle ground, , Penguin, 1985, , . .

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Jerusalem the Golden , Margaret Drabble, 2011, Bohemianism, 199 pages. Brought up in a stifling, emotionless home in the north of England, Clara finds freedom when she wins a scholarship and travels to London. There, she meets Clelia and the rest .... "The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future has not thinned yet." That is the emotional territory where sit, jelled, the four main characters of Drabble's new, loose, London-based, sympathetic, and loopingly optimistic novel. One's a social worker; one a journalist who...more "The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future has not thinned yet." That is the emotional territory where sit, jelled, the four main characters of Drabble's new, loose, London-based, sympathetic, and loopingly optimistic novel. One's a social worker; one a journalist who lost an arm years ago in Kurdistan; one's a doctor; and chiefly - although the main "character" here often seems to be the ludicrously resilient nature of forty-ish friendship itself - there is Kate Armstrong. A magazine columnist who was early on the bead of "women's subjects" ("menstruation, battered wives, low career expectations"), Kate - now in her forties - is unsure of what lies ahead. She's already divorced. Her children are about ready to leave. She's deeply, inextricably tangled in the lives of her friends: the doctor, Kate's ex-lover, is married to social-worker Evelyn; all three are friends of one-armed journalist Hugo. And Kate knows that what's still to come may be grim - death of children, freak violence, aging, unlovableness, financial insecurity. But finally she chooses to turn herself toward it with a sort of scruffy, disorganized hopefulness. Told almost completely in a series of ruminations (Kate's and her friends'), the book has a vulnerable, occasionally fey, but almost consistently charming lurch to it - a weather of Look! We've come through, a gathered and informal warmth. Indeed, with each succeeding novel, Drabble appears to edge ever closer to being E. M. Forster's heir: rich works, turned and molded by helpless circumstance, about the apprehensions and redemptions of staying responsible. And though nigh-plotless, almost sieve-like in fact, this new book presses that impression deepest." (Kirkus Reviews)(less)

Kate, a journalist, sees her job changing and maybe going away; she has been a writer of pieces about women, their problems and how society is wronging them. She had a liaison for many years with the husband of her best friend, with the blessings of said friend, as said friend didn’t want to hav...more “The Middle Ground― is basically a novel without a plot, a book driven by the characters. A middle aged group of British spouses, lovers and friends seeks to find their ways through mid-life crises time.

While mainly about the changes of middle age, this novel was written from a feminist viewpoint in the era when so many authors were writing feminist novels. Thankfully, this one has men who are not all selfish idiots. Well, her ex-lover is a selfish idiot, but the others aren’t. Everyone in this story is flawed but with a basic core of decency and respect for others; this is not a book of good and evil caricatures but of realism. The book follows them as they go about their everyday live, lives full of the same pains, problems and joys we all share. Though far from being Drabble’s best work, ‘Middle Ground’ is a warm paean to friendship and survival.

Maybe it was just because I haven't got to the stage in life that this book is all about, but I didn't enjoy this as much as some of Drabble's other novels. I'm assuming this is because I just didn't have enough in common with the main character - but I kept on reading in the hopes that it would get going, that some plot would emerge, and it really didn't. There wasn't much character development either. I definitely wouldn't recommend this to anyone trying Drabble for the first time.

It is hard to imagine anything more pretentious than this novel. I had to read it in university and it made me promise myself to never attempt another book on middle-aged women and their relationships. Especially if the writer is more preoccupied with how learned she comes across to the reader than imbuing the story with some kind of purpose.

I am finding the book quite absorbing, although, since it was written in 1980, the feminist and political views expressed by the characters seem rather dated, in the light of hindsight. I expect they were considered quite unusual at the time. Later: I am afraid that as the book progressed I began to lose interest in the main character's increasingly peculiar life, friends and acquaintances. I finished the book with difficulty and was very disappointed in it as Margaret Drabble has written some e...more I am finding the book quite absorbing, although, since it was written in 1980, the feminist and political views expressed by the characters seem rather dated, in the light of hindsight. I expect they were considered quite unusual at the time. Later: I am afraid that as the book progressed I began to lose interest in the main character's increasingly peculiar life, friends and acquaintances. I finished the book with difficulty and was very disappointed in it as Margaret Drabble has written some excellent novels and is usually one of my favourite authors. I fear this book is not in the same class as others she has written - or perhaps I lacked the intellect to enjoy it.(less)

Drabble has famously been engaged in a long-running feud with her novelist sister, A.S. Byatt, over the alleged appropriation of a family tea-set in one of her nove...more MARGARET DRABBLE is the author of The Sea Lady, The Seven Sisters, , and The Needle's Eye, among other novels. For her contributions to contemporary English literature, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.

Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire in 1939, and is the younger sister of A.S. Byatt. Margaret's novel won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize and she was granted a Society of Author's Travelling Fellowship in the mid-1960's. She received the James Tait Black and the E.M. Forster awards, and was awarded the CBE in 1980. She has three children and lives in London with her second husband, biographer Michael Holroyd. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The Middle Ground is another great novel from Margaret Drabble. I guess the title refers to that period in a person's life when the weight and seeming responsibilities of youth have been seen to be what they are: youthful egocentrism and arrogance. To come to that realization is both a release and a challenge: where do we go from here?

Kate Armstrong has reached thst point in her life. The mother of three children, she feels that men are impossible, and yet: "They (she and her ex lover)would gaze at one another forever, good friends perhaps, old allies, old enemies,across this impossible void...trying new voices, new gestures, making true efforts to hear, to listen, to understand.But hopelessly, hopelessly. Admit defeat....men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language.But are compelled forever, to try, and therefore even in defeat there is no peace." (P 236).

She looks back on the frustrations of a stultifying upbringing; she copes in the present with the difficulties of her complicated life in London in the 1980's; and when we leave her she's sitting on her bed, wondering what to wear, excitedly anticipating a party to which too many people have been invited, at which things can, and probably will, go wrong.She is bravely facing an unknown future, and this reader, for one, feels emboldened by her example in this wonderful, life-affirming novel.

She has had a spectacular career as a writer for women's magazines; she began writing "new wave" women's pieces before there was a term for them, sharing her pregnancies, exhaustions, indignations, and adventures with a shocked and enthralled public which is now devoted to her. She ahs wonderful friends - theater people who are exotic and nutty and kind, academics, scientists - intelligent, fulfilled, devoted men and women. She was married to a would-be painter, compulsively impractical, with a remarkable capacity for ruining his own chances. She had a long affair with the husband of a friend, but it didn't damage any of those involved, and it's over. She has run through the expected phases of life - intensely, passionately, in the most worthy way - but what now?

In this novel - so strong and alive, so wonderfully substantial - we see how this woman, with her charm and talent and energy, surrounded by a constant flux of family and friends ("Let her be happy," one of them prays, "let her recover, let her be a freak escape from the general doom …"), experiences this shaky plateau, her gifts and accomplishments in full flower, yet she herself poised for a t ransformation of resolve, direction, belief, something. We see her with her children, with her ex-husband, with her lovers, at work (has achievement become too much of a habit?), half involved in new ways in all the life around her, half giddy with a sense of sudden solitude and strength. We watch as she seems to lose, and then regain, her inner composure, and renew her determination - so mysteriously at risk - to open herself to the unseen future that is waiting for her to meet it. Margaret Drabble's "The Middle Ground" is a novel about nothing, and everything. The story takes places over a two month period of time, coupled with extensive flashbacks. Although some readers may initially be put off by the lack of a linear narrative, it will be difficult to dismiss the book entirely as one becomes caught up in the character's lives.

The books explores amoung other things, issues central to modern day society:, rascism, class structures, and feminism. Kate's ambivilant attitude to her own status as a writer of women's fiction is a fascinating examination of both the positive and negative effects of the "women liberation movement."

"The Middle Ground" is a book not just about these characters but is also self consciously about how to write a book about such characters. The novel constantly asks the reader to question the reliability of any of the narratives he or she is reading. It calls into question our ideas about truth and fiction by telling us for example that we are hearing only one possible account of Kate's life in which some things will be highlighted and others omitted.

This is a massively assured and competent novel from a woman who has been writing since the late sixties and never fails to find something interesting to say. She has slipped from the top-twenty of novelists (if there is such a thing) and might now be considered someone who has had her day, but I find her bracing and salutary. She was in the forefront of novelists who could write about people with the deep interest and compassion that they deserved, but she never had much truck with `story' which has become newly fashionable. Story was always secondary to `condition of life' in her long series of novels about human relationships that ran from the late sixties to the late eighties and beyond.

Though such distinctions are often artificial, they come to the fore when thinking about what she writes. Here it is mostly about Kate - a charming, attractive, but rather undisciplined woman. Her marriage is a disaster and her affair with the husband of a friend doesn't turn out much better, but she manages to raise three children, give a temporary home to a number of misfits and social outcasts, as well as take lovers, though much good that does her. She is renowned for her successful parties and she has a newly warming relationship with an old friend, Hugo. Kate also holds down a job as a radical campaigning journalist and is liked by almost everyone. Emotionally intelligent, reliable and great fun, she nevertheless has her dark moments and Drabble is successful in bringing out the nuances of the complex and interesting character of her protagonist.

I rather disapprove, however, of Drabble's insistence of foregrounding the author (...and here we will leave her... and the like). This seems to have no effect other than a way to let the author move on - but it reads as lazy and is sometimes distracting - is this a novel or just Margaret Drabble's book of gossip? Why not just cut the scene and move to the next?

Although she has more than 20 books to her name – 17 novels, literary biographies, and most recently a memoir – Margaret Drabble this month publishes her first collection of short stories, A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman. It includes nearly every one she has ever written. Printed in chronological order, they span more than 40 years. There are surprisingly few, only 13 in all, but together they make up a compelling document of social history. She is delighted to see them published in one volume, which is dedicated to her agent, the late Pat Kavanagh. As with her novels, over the years the characters get steadily older, each story capturing a different stage in a woman's life, from youthful uncertainty, through the intensities of infidelity and marital disillusionment, to the freedom and regrets of maturity. "People age," she says. "I've always been interested in what is happening to my contemporaries and what is still happening."

Drabble is now a very youthful 72 (it was her birthday last week). We talk in her study, a sunny yellow room on the ground floor of the large house in Ladbroke Grove she shares with her husband, the biographer Michael Holroyd, who works on the second floor. On the wall is a colourful picture of them in her Somerset house, both reading manuscripts, her daughter as a young girl, looking attentively on. From the London study there is a view out to the garden, serenely landscaped around a small pond by her son, the TV gardener Joe Swift. At one end is her desk and at the other a large table with a semi-completed jigsaw of a Klimt painting, "much harder than you'd imagine". Jigsaws are one of her favourite pastimes and were the starting point for her memoir The Pattern in the Carpet, a hybrid book subtitled "A Personal History with Jigsaws", written mainly as a distraction while Holroyd was seriously ill a few years ago.

The previous week, Drabble read at an event hosted by the Literary Consultancy (which is run by her daughter, Rebecca Swift), along with Helen Simpson. She was struck, she says now, by the similarities between their stories, even though Simpson's were written much later: "they are both tragi-comedies of marital relationships, and it is as though nothing has improved over 30 years. Men and women are still fighting for precedence and knocking into one another and thoroughly annoying each other in the same way they always have."

When Simpson suggested there are few sympathetic men in Drabble's stories, Drabble retorted that it was surely true of them both. Simpson reflected on the predictability of the "F question" in interviews, and it is one that Drabble will have heard often. Like Doris Lessing, a long-term friend and influence, she denies (although much less stridently than Lessing) that she set out to write explicitly "feminist" books. But, like Lessing, she will always be associated with the fledgling years of feminism, as she was one of the most assiduous chroniclers of female experience in Britain during that time.

Drabble's work has always been characterised by astute social observation, a realism borne out of her admiration for Victorian fiction. At one point, her novels, with their clever conversations and adulterous intrigues, were synonymous with the now unfashionable "Hampstead novel"; although she did live there for many years and "represented a particular point of view", she points out that she didn't actually set many novels there, as she was worried about identifying her neighbours. But what Joyce Carol Oates describes as her "seemingly infinite sympathy for 'ordinary women'" ensures that her work will endure; indeed three of her early novels are being reissued as Penguin Classics this autumn. And so it is with the stories.

The title – taken from the longest story – was chosen by her American publisher, but she agrees it works well for the collection as a whole. Nearly all these "snapshots of women's lives", as she calls them, show the protagonists attempting to put a brave face on the disappointments of everyday life, or the schism between their public and private selves. She is candid about drawing on personal experience and often disguises real people as characters: one is based on her ex-husband, the actor Clive Swift, another on a manipulative friend, now dead. "The Merry Widow", about a woman's sense of liberation following the death of her domineering husband, was in fact written just after her mother's death.

And what about "one of the biggest American writers of his generation" who tries to seduce a successful young playwright from the north at a smart London party? "Oh, that was Saul Bellow," she says immediately. "He was a hero of mine, and I didn't at all mind him making a pass at me. In fact I felt really pleased. But then I realised as a feminist I shouldn't have been so amused. But I did like him very much. I still read him with admiration." Antonia Fraser tells a similar anecdote about Bellow making advances to her in a taxi when they were Booker judges in 1971. "We are not alone in that," she says, laughing. "Find me a woman he didn't make a pass at!" http://kgarch.org/eb1.pdf http://kgarch.org/fkj.pdf http://kgarch.org/10f.pdf http://kgarch.org/2jn.pdf http://kgarch.org/cld.pdf http://kgarch.org/62.pdf http://kgarch.org/e4a.pdf http://kgarch.org/537.pdf http://kgarch.org/5ca.pdf http://kgarch.org/7kg.pdf http://kgarch.org/261.pdf http://kgarch.org/67f.pdf http://kgarch.org/5d7.pdf http://kgarch.org/1cd.pdf http://kgarch.org/80m.pdf http://kgarch.org/4jb.pdf http://kgarch.org/6ld.pdf http://kgarch.org/gmd.pdf http://kgarch.org/271.pdf