The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble

I was pleased to see Roger Angell’s appreciation of The Garrick Year, an early novel by Margaret Drabble, in a recent issue of The New Yorker.

It’s a short, romantic novel about actors and the theatre and marriage and sex and babies, written when Drabble was twenty-four years old… [T]his book belongs to Drabble’s heroine, Emma Evans, who is married to the dashing, muscular Welsh leading man David Evans, and the mother of their very young children, Flora and Joseph.... Emma, the daughter of a theologian, is tall—taller than David—and sometimes works as a model, and she is extremely, extravagantly intelligent. The book is told in the first person, her first person, which means that there are many unsparingly critical and deliciously bitter views of the vanity of actors and the babyish needs of actors’ lives and, in many cases, their stupidity.

I picked up The Garrick Year for the first time in years, and was pleased to find that it’s as good as Angell says. Though the canvas is smaller than those Drabble worked on later in her career, it is just as sharp in language and psychology as any of them.

What’s more, it features several characteristic examples of unpredictable events that seem to come out of nowhere, and that people nonetheless adjust to. Angell mentions the episode in which Emma’s little girl Flora accidentally turns on the gas in the kitchen. Another (none of them proves fatal) comes late in the book, when Emma is helping guide the car of her sort-of lover out of her garage, just as her husband’s car can be seen approaching down the street. Emma ends up pinned against the garage, and the combined efforts of her husband and her lover to rescue her lead to an odd sort of reconciliation.