A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A SMILING WOMAN: COMPLETE SHORT STORIES
By Margaret Drabble
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24, 227 pages
British writer Margaret Drabble writes about the souls of women. In “A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman,” a collection of 14 exquisite short stories published between 1964 and 2000, she exposes the secret longings, hearts and minds of her female characters. The stories are beautifully constructed and written. The language is spare, elegant and ironic. There are no beginnings and no endings; the reader is dropped into the middle of an ongoing situation. What occurs is usually unexpected.
In his excellent introduction, Spanish scholar Jose Francisco Fernandez points out that in the early stories, there is a longing for the exotic to be discovered in travel. In later stories, “contemplation caused by the struggle of love” comes to the fore. In the last stories, Dame (since 2008) Margaret’s characters seek peace and solitude.
The stories depict social issues and class conflicts. Many of the women in her stories are famous. In “The Caves of God,” Hannah, a geneticist who won a Nobel prize, reflects, “Women and fame have a peculiar relationship. Women believe themselves undervalued and ignored and powerless, and indeed most of them are, but a consequence of this … is that those who achieve eminence are more visible than men of the same rank, and are subjected to a more prurient curiosity.”
Kathie Jones in “A Success Story” is a playwright, “good at explaining herself, at arguing with megalomaniac directors, at coolly sticking to her own ideas, at adapting when things really couldn’t be made to work. She … could stand up for herself.” When she meets an author she had always admired, she discovers that “it was much pleasanter to be comfortable than thrilled.”
In the title story, “A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman,” Jenny Jamieson, a successful television interviewer, “was never late. She never forgot appointments. … She always managed to say the right things to everyone; she never offended and yet never made people dull. … Everyone admired her, nobody disliked her.” Jenny’s complacent existence is shattered when bitter words are exchanged with her husband and when her doctor informs her that the unusual bleeding she is experiencing requires surgery.
She suddenly sees herself as dying, leaving her children unloved. “The apathy of God, the random blows of fate and the force for good and ill of human love: these things, combined, constituted a world so bitter, so dark, so tragic, that she felt her heart weep and die like her body.”
In “The Dower House at Kellynch: A Somerset Romance,” a famous actress falls in love with a house and sets out to acquire it because she “had never seen anywhere so beautiful in [her] life. Pink peeling walls, grey-yellow lichen encrusted stone, single white roses, white doves. It had reached the moment before decay that is perfection.”
“Hassan’s Tower” begins mysteriously: ” ’If,’ she said, ’I could be sure they were free, then I would eat them.’
” ’They must be free,’ he said, ’when you look at the price of the drink.’ “
An upper-class couple on a tense honeymoon in Morocco are contemplating a plate of hors d’oeuvres, “little squares of toast, with their sadly appetizing decorations of sardine, shrimp and olive.” The story ends with a sudden catharsis permitting the snobbish groom to recognize the humanity around him.
The stories reflect Ms. Drabble’s eye for detail and color: “She sat and looked down at the red-veined Formica tabletop. … Then she looked up at the dark yellow ceiling, with its curiously useless trelliswork hung with plastic lemons and bananas, and then at the wall, papered in a strange, delicate, dirty flowered print.”
Nature is vividly described: “The dark raw caked sliced earth, the ribbed ledges, the steaming fissures, the stunted trees sticking out of recent landslips, the dreary trickling of small black waterfalls, the dreary pounding of wave after wave upon the wet curve of the beach.” Or, on another note: “Ferns sprouted like orchids from the trunks of vast oaks overhanging the rapid rivers, ivy with berries like grapes rampaged up ash and beech in tropical splendour, and hollies soared towards the sky. Primeval lichens of grey and sage green and dazzling orange encrusted bark and twig and stone, and the red earth broke into bubbles of scarlet and purple and bright spongy yellow.”
The stories are short; the pleasure in reading them is long.
• Corinna Lothar is a writer and critic in Washington.
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