Volume 22, Number 19 · November 27, 1975
Lost Allusions
By Christopher Ricks
The Realms of Gold
by Margaret Drabble
Knopf, 354 pp., $8.95
Cockpit
by Jerzy Kosinski
Houghton Mifflin, 249 pp., $8.95
'Much have I travelled in the realms of gold.' Frances Wingate, much-traveled and middle-aged, a famously successful archaeologist and a brisk brusque blithely fragile divorcée, is the heroine of Margaret Drabble's The Realms of Gold. On first looking into The Realms of Gold, one sees at once that Miss Drabble, deep-browed and middle-browed, has chosen to rule a wide expanse of private and public life. Frances Wingate is more connected than she would like to be to her family relations: her vice-chancellor father and her birth-controlling mother; her hypersensitive suicidal nephew, Stephen; her professionally armored geologist cousin, David, and her very differently armored cousin, Janet, a challenge in her suburban demureness; and even—and this is the true surprise of the book, as it is the true surprise to Frances herself—her aged great-aunt Connie, who dies alone, starving, in her ruined cottage. The past of Aunt Connie and of her cottage moves Frances as nothing else in her family world or her professional world had ever done, and it moves us too. It is the distant relation who comes closest.
Review, 3074 words
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