Volume 36, Number 18 · November 23, 1989
England, Whose England?
By Hilary Mantel
A Natural Curiosity
by Margaret Drabble
Viking, 309 pp., $19.95
Nice Work
by David Lodge
Viking, 277 pp., $18.95
What shall we expect of the middle-age of the middlebrow novelist? (By the term middlebrow, one seeks to describe a writer who, while disdaining the shoddy and the ephemeral, has built up a following among intelligent readers whose notions he takes care not to challenge or disturb.) After the first half-dozen books, at a point where a certain weary technical proficiency can be taken for granted, that writer may discover he is estranged from his generation. He no longer knows anyone who isn't a writer, of some sort. He is set in the practice of his unnatural and solitary vice, and he cannot imagine what ordinary people do for a living.
Review, 3041 words
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