Worth every penny

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman is a rare example of a dying breed: the collected short stories. Spanning from 1966 to 2000, the singularly spindly tales document the heady social change of the period in question. But more than that, they demonstrate the delightfully tricksy nature of the short story as a form: from workaday realism to postmodern artfulness, and every shade between.
 
It is easy to misread Drabble through the fog of reputation. Few living writers have the clout, or the DBEs to go with it, that both she and her sister (one A.S. Byatt) can boast by the bucketload. But, of course, the first stories in this collection speak without all of that. The nervy, rather tentative voice that comes from the early tales is that of a writer newly seated at the typewriter. Thus we have the rather heavy-handed ‘visionary gleam of meaning’ in the first story ‘Hassan’s Tower’, that old Joycean trick of epiphany (see Stevie Davies for more on this, though she links it to George Eliot), and the boisterous grammar of ‘A Voyage to Cythera’.
 
A third of the way through, however, the rookie tone hardens into steely assurance. A story like ‘The Gifts of War’ is a supremely poised tale of social change and disfunction, the older generation of women with their head-scarves and oafishly awful husbands colliding with the irenic ideals of the educationally empowered. The robust vocabulary of class, combined with the now-foreign talk of ‘thirty shillings’ and ‘ten-bob notes’, gives the story historical purchase as well supreme literary worth. A painful conclusion, sieving the older generation through the mental hinterland of the next, maximizes the power of the short story form – a human scream amplified by the authorial whisper.
 
Of course, the stories are all women-centered. To brand them feminist would be clunkily reductive; tales like ‘A Success Story’ or the title-piece ‘A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman’ taunt ideological dogma, bringing to bear the full negative capability of the individual situation and the conflicted demands of women’s roles circa 1972. But, sadly, the same can’t be said for the male characters (a frequent complaint: see Davies and Duguid (£)). Marriage is portrayed as uniformly calamitous, while husbands/men are reduced to the roles of alcoholic (‘The Gifts of War’), lecherous schmoozer (‘A Success Story’), embittered moaner (‘A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman’), pretentious irritant (‘The Merry Widow’) or obnoxious ‘cad’ (‘The Dower House at Kellynch: A Somerset Romance’).
 
It is left to one of the best stories, ‘The Caves of God’, to skittle this unhappy prescription of roles. The final scene, where Nobel-prize winner Hannah rediscovers her former husband, achieves a tender pathos and a more generous appreciation of the male race than hitherto. The story also signals a gear-change in tone (something Showalter also notes and  writes well on). From here on in, the stories acquire additional tinsel. Not only does the carefully crimped prose bud into rosier lyricism, but the inclusion of some literary references gives the last few stories (particularly the superb ‘Stepping Westward: A Topographical Tale’) additional decorative and intellectual layering.
 
But the gear-changes merely attest to Drabble’s versatility. Every trick from the short-story manual is brought into play at some stage or other as the collection progresses. It is a dazzling performance. Not only because of the ever-present threat of extinction to the form, but because the writing – many-coloured, innovative and rich with literary worth – makes the cover-price seem cheap.