SOURCE: “Severed Heads, Primal Crimes, Narrative Revisions: Margaret Drabble's A Natural Curiosity,” in Critique, Vol. XXXIII, No. 2, Winter, 1992, pp. 95-105.

[In the following essay, Rubenstein examines the significance of decapitation and social deviancy in A Natural Curiosity. As Rubenstein notes, Drabble draws upon allusions to classical mythology and Freudian psychology to explore the mysteries of human nature and latent evil.]

Why is Margaret Drabble fascinated with severed heads and dismembered bodies? Increasingly in her fiction, beginning with The Ice Age （1977）, images of dismemberment or decapitation form part of the narrative subtext: in The Ice Age, Kitty Friedman is maimed by random IRA violence that kills her husband; another character, Alison Murray, reads with fascinated horror the newspaper account of a woman blown to bits by a bomb. Hugo Mainwaring of The Middle Ground （1980） has an amputated forearm. In The Radiant Way （1987）, a novel deeply concerned with social and psychological deviance, the imagery shifts from dismemberment in general to decapitation in particular; Drabble employs both classical and contemporary images of severed heads, juxtaposing the figure of the gorgon Medusa with the contemporary serial killings of a murderer who decapitates his victims.

Although Drabble did not originally intend to write a sequel to The Radiant Way, she felt that the novel “was in some way unfinished, that it had asked questions it had not answered, and introduced people who had hardly been allowed to speak” （Drabble frontispiece）. Thus, in a continuing pursuit of answers to questions raised in the preceding novel（s）, Drabble's characters in A Natural Curiosity struggle to comprehend social pathology and deviancy. Alix Bowen and Liz Headleand are, figuratively, archaeologists in the realms of the psyche and the social order: Liz, a practicing psychotherapist who helps her clients unravel family histories complicated by adoption; and Alix, a social worker and teacher who confesses a deep fascination with “prisons, discipline, conviction, violence and the criminal mentality” and worries that her morbid curiosity reflects darker tendencies buried within her own “nice” self. Despite her deeply law-abiding orientation, as a child Alix had been “haunted by the idea the one day she would find herself in the dock accused of a terrible crime which she had not committed.” Fascinated by the “unnatural,” she seeks the sources of the pathological behavior of the Horror of Harrow Road, the decapitating murderer of The Radiant Way who, seven years later, is serving a life sentence in a top-security prison for his crimes.

Through her characters' curiosity about the deeper sources of human behavior, including its pathological manifestations, Drabble elaborates on and revises the meaning of several central images and events of the immediately preceding novel. In that novel, Liz Headleand turns her professional expertise as a psychotherapist onto herself, entering the psychological labyrinth of her own repressed past to confront the sexual minotaur of childhood in the figure of her pedophilic father; Alix Bowen, through her association with the decapitating murderer's final victim, is linked with the classical myth of Perseus who beheads the gorgon Medusa. In the sequel, A Natural Curiosity, the two women's mythological roles are reversed: Liz, following a further revelation in her “family romance,” imagines composing “a brilliantly original treatise on Medusa: Our Hidden Knowledge”; Alix becomes the narrative's more active “detective,” figuratively entering a labyrinthine underworld and initiating a quest to solve the riddle of Paul Whitmore's criminal deviancy. Both women （the third member of their triangular friendship, Esther Breuer, is only a minor character in this novel） are thus drawn to fathom “ancient crimes ＼that］ arise to declare themselves, to invite detection. Graves weep blood, sinners return to the fatal scene, the primal crime.”

Invoking the mood of Greek tragedy and classical tales of retribution through this intense, even exaggerated, language, Drabble thus locates her characters' contemporary search for answers to the riddle of human relationships within a many-stranded web of mythological, historical, and psychological contexts. Drabble has always been interested in the relationship between moral and psychological realities: between the classical moral categories of what her character Alix Bowen terms “Original Sin. Evil and Good” on the one hand; and, on the other, the quotidian contexts of material and psychological forces that suggest influences beyond the individual's responsibility or control. Drabble represents the complex fabric of her characters' private lives and social relationships by locating them in a universe poised between benign and arbitrary or even malign potentialities. Particularly in The Radiant Way and A Natural Curiosity, she explores the intricate pattern—and the absence of pattern—in the multiple cross sections of contemporary experience, from the natural exchanges that animate friendship and romantic relationships to the “unnatural,” the pervasive social pathology that runs like a fault line beneath the surface of ordinary events.

Drabble's major characters, motivated by a deep hunger for comprehension, actively seek to understand the nature of the collective social body within which they pursue their private affairs. As Liz phrases it, “what I … suffer from is curiosity. I want to know what really happened … at the beginning. When human nature began. At the beginning of human time. And I know I'll never know. But I can't stop looking” （emphasis in original）. Alix also “suffers” from curiosity, although her fascination with monstrosity is rooted in her need to domesticate horror rather than to work out her own family aberrations.

One of the moral-social riddles that Drabble herself worries away in her recent fiction and particularly in A Natural Curiosity is the classical “nature-nurture” debate: are people shaped inexorably by the “shabby little secrets” and deprivations that occurred in their early lives, or can they act freely, even sometimes “out of character,” as adults? Alix Bowen, philosophically committed to the “nurture” side of the argument, believes that if she can identify the sources of “her” murderer's criminal behavior, she can resolve questions within herself about the pathological tendencies in human nature. She feels almost mystically linked with the murderer, who acquires a human identity in this volume: a vegetarian and the son of a hairdresser and a butcher, Paul Whitmore is apparently reasonable and intelligent enough to be fascinated by botany and ancient British history. Alix, who enlists herself as his sympathetic ally, determines that if she can locate his mother, who had abandoned him both literally and emotionally in childhood, she will be able to redeem not only him but “Mankind.” The murderer's earlier savage behavior becomes the focus for Alix's—and Drabble's—continuing explorations of the “unnatural” dimension of human nature.

Accordingly, the dark side of human potentiality is explored with reference to its long, if not distinguished, history. A museum exhibition that Alix and Liz attend together features the Lindow Man, a recently unearthed sacrificial corpse brutally mutilated two millenia ago and miraculously preserved. Alix speculates that Paul Whitmore, incarcerated in prison rather than sacrificially killed for his crimes as he might have been in an earlier era, is “a kind of Lindow Man in a glass coffin.” In fact, these fossilized and entombed human figures, separated by two millenia but linked by their expression of the criminal potentiality in human nature, serve to anchor the historical as well as the moral sweep of A Natural Curiosity. Mention of other human fossils punctuates the characters' conversations, including the Piltdown Man hoax, the Bog Man of Tollund, and the Bog Man of Buller—about whom Alix's employer, the poet Howard Beaver, himself an aged “living fossil,” once wrote a poem. Lindow Man is a “link and messenger from the underworld” not only of the past but of the psyche.

Also ranged along the historical continuum are reflections concerning the early inhabitants of Britain: Celts, Brigantes, Druids, and Parisis. Figures and events from Greek and Latin literature and mythology, including Oedipus and the sphinx as well as Pegasus, Icarus, Medusa, and others occupy the thoughts and conversations of a number of characters. These references and allusions to ancient cultures highlight the tensions between civilized behavior and the “passion for atrocities” that underlies it. Considering the barbarities amply recorded in classical texts of human culture from the Bible and the Vedas to Greek tragedy and the Koran, Liz Headleand wonders if “the whole of human history is nothing but a history of deepening psychosis? That something went wrong at the beginning of human nature, of human nurture, that humanity mistook itself fatally, for ever? False revelation, hoax riddles, grinning sphinxes from prehistory.”

One particular image of atrocity, the severed head, appears even more frequently in A Natural Curiosity than in The Radiant Way. Drabble's two-volume preoccupation also ranges widely from classical to contemporary images, even appearing encoded in the name of one of the narrative's major characters, Liz Headleand. While the primary classical allusions of The Radiant Way are familiar Greek figures, a number of the allusions in A Natural Curiosity are from less familiar Latin sources. Celia Harper, Liz Headleand's niece （a minor character） who is studying ancient history at Oxford, reads the Roman historians, mulling over Tacitus's depiction of the death of Piso by decapitation. Alix, also reading Tacitus, turns to the poet Lucan to ponder a passage describing Caesar's desecration of the sacred grove of Massila. A book that Alix gives the incarcerated murderer Paul Whitmore describes the influence of the Roman religion on the Old Religion of Britain; Paul considers a passage in that volume citing Lucan on the sacred grove of the gods—a direct paraphrase of the passage Alix later reads. Moreover—almost too conveniently—while Alix is pondering Lucan, she catches a pertinent fragment of a television program on Celtic religion; the commentator remarks that “As the cross is to Christianity, so the severed head to the Celtic religion”; “the soul resided in the head, according to the Celts.” Thus, in this novel the severed head image, in addition to serving as a leitmotif continued from the preceding narrative, also acquires a revisionist meaning, becoming associated not only with barbarity but with religious ritual. At the same time, a reader may feel that the image, invoked so insistently, betrays the novel's scaffolding and occasionally threatens to undermine Drabble's intentions.

Juxtaposed with the images of ancient lives and monstrous deaths are the more recent historical figures enshrined in Madame Tussaud's wax museum, where Alix pursues her fascination with the etiology of atrocity and decapitation. There, she gazes at wax effigies of “Mary Queen of Scots about to have her head cut off.” Descending into another kind of underworld, the subterranean Chamber of Horrors, she observes “the authentic casts of the severed heads of Louis and Marie Antoinette.” Appropriately, the figure of Alix's “own” murderer, the decapitating Horror of Harrow Road, is a recent addition to the wax “Hall of Fame.” Descriptions of terrible contemporary atrocities—decapitation, dismemberment, rape, sexual abuse, and child abuse—periodically are inserted into the narrative either in characters' conversations or as part of the television news they glimpse. These recurring images of human barbarity emphasize a central implication of A Natural Curiosity （and of Drabble's recent fiction）: that beneath the civilized surface, human society has not advanced far beyond its early destructive and pathological tendencies.

II.

“Is nothing safe, is all knowledge to be revised, will not the dead lie quietly. …” Alix's query, elicited by her musings on the dietary patterns of Britain's ancient inhabitants, hints at several central issues from which the narrative's concern with abnormality and the “unnatural” spring. The “revision” process that she names applies to the personal histories that she and Liz reconstruct during the course of A Natural Curiosity and also, more generally, to one of Drabble's own narrative strategies. As Liz phrases it, “We stare backwards into time, and continue to find new plots, new patterns.” Appropriately for a sequel—and indicative of Drabble's revisionist impulse in this novel—patterns of imagery and theme developed in The Radiant Way are carried forward into new “plots” and developments in A Natural Curiosity. One of these thematic variations concerns the mysteries of the flesh, understood through the body's connections to sexuality, to food, and to annihilation through death—natural or unnatural, with or without the context of religious ritual.

On this serious central preoccupation, Drabble juxtaposes a series of comic and ironic variations, ranging from descriptions of a minor character's equation of “fucking and cooking” and the parallels between food preparation and bodily discharges to another character's nymphomania; the murderer Paul's vegetarianism resonates ironically with eating disorders and with the butchery of meat that underlies the common diet. More seriously, suicide and natural death, both of which occur to characters close to Liz and Alix during the narrative, highlight the predominantly middle-aged characters' anxieties about death. Additionally, the narrative is punctuated with accounts of crimes of violence, from muggings （Liz's ex-husband is mugged） and racially motivated murders to dismemberment and several bizarre incidents involving the deaths of children （in one instance by a crossbow）. As if to locate these chilling contemporary events within a larger historical context, Alix speculates, as a result of her reading of certain Latin writers, that perhaps the classics, rather than teaching us “balance, wisdom, stoicism,” reveal “monstrosities.”

The narrator—who, as in most of Drabble's recent novels, directly addresses the reader from time to time—speaks only partly in jest when she describes the narrative as “not a political novel. More a pathological novel. A psychotic novel.” Drabble's exploration of individual and social pathology in A Natural Curiosity—her characters' fascination with the deviant and unnatural—also included a more veiled exploration of sexual deviance and what Liz Headleand terms “hidden knowledge.” Through a number of separate incidents described in the narrative, Drabble tests assumptions about normalcy in sexuality and in what Liz has earlier referred to in psychoanalytic parlance as the “family romance.” Accordingly, two predominant emotional states for Drabble's characters in the novel （as in the one that precedes it） are shame and guilt, particularly with reference to childhood experiences. Alix Bowen, haunted as a child by dreams of crimes she had not committed, contrasts herself with Paul Whitmore, who “did not feel guilty, although he admitted guilt. Alix felt guilty when she was not, and knew she was not.”

Several minor characters in A Natural Curiosity express aspects of the narrative's concerns with guilt, shame, and sexual deviancy. However, the most explicit references to deviant sexuality concern the sexual abuse of children. Liz Headleand, herself the victim of such abuse, makes outrageous comments on a television program, revealing her ambivalence about her own personal history. During a panel discussion on sex and the young, she shocks her peers and her audience by “uttering atrocities” such as supporting the abolition of age-of-consent laws. Even more astonishingly, she virtually defends the “desire of adults for sexual contact with children,” arguing that “this desire itself could be less abnormal than you believe it to be.” Liz's preoccupations represent what Drabble identifies as a current social preoccupation with child sex abuse, which has become “suddenly, astonishingly fashionable, as a theme for indignation, moralizing, vindictiveness, sensational journalism.” Liz's solicitor recognizes that Liz's comments, far from being the neutral observations of a professional psychoanalyst, are “an act of elaborate professional and personal self-justification, a baroque attempt on Liz's part to justify her own genesis. …” Later, Liz reveals to her former husband her guilty feeling that in some way she is responsible for her father's death by suicide. Her feelings are in fact consistent with those of victims of sexual abuse who believe that they are to blame for what has happened to them. Liz also wonders whether Freud was correct in his initial—though later rejected—observations concerning “the high incidence of abuse of children by parents.” Through Liz's comments, Drabble demonstrates her familiarity with contemporary disagreements within psychoanalytic theory as well as with the relation of that theory to her social concerns.

Paul Whitmore is also a victim of parental abuse, although in his case the abuse was emotional rather than overtly sexual. Through Alix's sincere effort to comprehend the pathology and psychosis that might “explain” Whitmore's grisly aberration, Drabble attempts to make the serial murderer （though not his crimes） an object of sympathy rather than revulsion. Paul's revelation to Alix that his mother ran off with a lorry driver during his adolescence provides her with the scent of a trail that eventually does lead to his unnatural mother and to Alix's own speculations about maternal influence and abuse. Paul's mother, Angela Whitmore Malkin （her names, particularly her surname—Mal-kin—are aptly chosen） is almost a caricature of evil. Paul's childhood memories of his father's butcher shop, with its grinning pigs' heads, fuse with the image of his mother “gazing at herself in a mirror. Her hair stands out from her head in long stiff silver spikes, some six inches long.” Thus is Angela allied with severed heads, both human and animal, as well as with the Medusa in her hideous form. As Alix eventually undertakes an expedition to locate Angela Malkin, she acknowledges her morbid fascination with severed heads, which she begins to see “wherever she looks. She collects them.” Even the knocker on the door of the sinister country house where Paul's mother lives in a tête coupée in the “shape of a woman's head with flowing locks”; Alix sees it as “a Medusa … a Celtic offering.”

Angela Malkin and her absent male partners are breeders of bull mastiffs; Alix, overwhelmed by the smells and sounds of cringing, howling dogs, feels the sadistic monstrosity of their country house on her first visit. Not surprisingly Paul Whitmore's mother angrily rejects Alix's pleas on his behalf; renouncing all connection to her “pig” son, she threatens Alix with repercussions if she does not stay out of her affairs. Alix retreats, only to dream （rather transparently） about a dog she must protect from a monstrous woman wielding a butcher knife. Her return visit is almost a fulfillment of her dream: a ghoulish scene of abandoned, dying dogs in a room with a rotting severed horse's head suspended from the ceiling. Defending herself against the clearly mad Angela by hurling a tin can that strikes her in the chest, Alix enters the criminal state herself: her manifest capacity to commit “bodily harm,” although in self-defense, nonetheless allies her symbolically with “her” murderer and with the human potentiality for extreme behavior.

Yet in identifying and subduing his monstrous mother, Alix feels that she has finally vindicated Paul Whitmore. “He had been mothered by a mad woman, a fury, a harpy, a gorgon. … Poor Paul was exonerated. … The finger points at Angela.” The malevolent woman whose “red hair in a blazing crest” again alludes to Medusa, had effectively turned her son to unfeeling stone; according to Paul's father, she had “teased and tormented” him during childhood, fueling an obsession with “death and human sacrifice” that ultimately finds its expression in savage sacrificial revenge and decapitation. Alix's archaeological detective work on the “primal crimes” in the Whitmore family also discloses that Paul had a twin sister who died in infancy. Paul's mother's rejection, Alix speculates, stems from her preference for the female child who died; her cruel anger was directed toward the male child who survived.

Other “lost” sisters appear in other threads of the narrative: Liz Headleand figuratively loses and literally finds a sister. Her sister Shirley temporarily vacates her customary identity and domicile, disappearing for a month in what Liz later calls a “hysterical fugue” state following her husband's suicide. Another unknown sibling emerges late in the narrative as Drabble revises a classical literary device—which she wittily terms the “sister ex machina”—while also revising Liz Headleand's family history. Liz is one of two uninvited guests at a large social gathering. By a narrative coincidence that one may regard as either humorously satisfying or contrived, the other uninvited guest, Marcia Campbell, an adoptee, reveals herself as the sibling of Liz, a therapist who specializes in the identity problems of adults adopted as children. Marcia discloses the facts that she has pieced together concerning their mutual maternal origins: she is their mother Rita Ablewhite's illegitimate daughter by a titled aristocrat. Before Liz's own birth, her mother had given her illegitimate baby daughter up for adoption, in return for a covenanted annuity from her lover stipulating that financial support would continue only as long as she maintained secrecy and remained married to Alfred Ablewhite.

Through this revelation of unsuspected elements in the “family romance” （understood by now not only psychoanalytically but also ironically） that had unsuspectingly colored Liz's childhood, Drabble amends an incompletely resolved dimension of her character's life story in The Radiant Way. The new knowledge also compels Liz to revise her image of her mother as mad and agoraphobic by acknowledging the pathos of her lifelong imprisonment in silence as a consequence of her hidden “primal crime.” Liz herself feels “reborn” through her new and more sympathetic vision of her mother.

III.

Alix Bowen muses to herself during a visit with Paul Whitmore, “Riddles, mysteries. How to read them? Was there any way of reading them?” The reader also asks: how should one read the recurring theme of “primal crimes” and the imagery of severed heads—and Drabble's preoccupation with them—insistently figured in A Natural Curiosity, as in the novel that precedes it? In both narratives, through the major characters' attempts to identify the sources of personal and social pathology, Drabble explores the continuum that links “natural” and “unnatural”: even the narrative's most “normal” characters acknowledge their affinities with extremity—their attraction to the abnormal, the deviant, or the dangerous. The veneer of civilization is indeed very thin.

Through Alix Bowen and Liz Headleand's inconclusive inquiries into the origins of social aberration, Drabble narratively represents and interrogates alternative theoretical assumptions that derive from psychology and sociobiology. Is the propensity toward atrocity rooted in traumatic childhood experiences? Or are its sources genetically determined, already imbedded in the human psyche at birth? As Liz speculates, perhaps “abnormality is in-built, by now.” In this novel, more than in The Radiant Way, Drabble attempts to rationalize deviant behavior as well as the human fascination with it. Paul Whitmore embodies the author's simultaneous inquiry into and sympathetic domestication of criminal abnormality and the “unnatural.” In fact, the intertextual revisionism of A Natural Curiosity permits Drabble to comment on, modulate, and amend psychological and social themes initiated in The Radiant Way.

Yet, one weakness of this revisionist impulse is that in her attempt to meld complex social issues with narrative complexity, Drabble obscures her own position concerning the atrocities represented or reported in the narrative. Are they to be understood as the psychotic expressions of disturbed individuals whose parents neglected or abused them in childhood? Alix, the optimist, and Liz, the pessimist, admit both the appeal and the inadequacy of this line of reason. Whereas early in the narrative, Alix wonders whether the serial killer is “victim, villain, or accident,” by the end of the novel she has concluded that Paul Whitmore is less a villain than himself a victim—not only of a psychologically disturbed mother but of a pathologically disturbed society.

Thus Drabble narratively rehabilitates and “revises” Whitmore from the terrifying serial murderer of the earlier novel to a meek and even intellectually curious man who is “distressing rather than frightening,” who “instilled sorrow, not fear. Sorrow for human suffering, for human distress, for waste, for error.” Equally significant as evidence of Drabble's revisionist and rehabilitative impulse in this sequel, the appearance of Liz Headleand's unsuspected half-sister at a party at which both are uninvited guests almost has a fairy tale quality to it: Drabble naturalizes, even romanticizes, Liz's aberrant childhood, revising the incomplete story of her agoraphobic mother into a more sympathetic tale of illegitimate passion between people of different social classes. Liz's pedophilic father is also narratively revised and rehabilitated. Through the daughter's defensive psychological rationalizations, he is amended “into a plot, a pattern ＼that］ allowed him to emerge as harmless, inoffensive, suffering perhaps from some glandular abnormality: a timid man, sexually inadequate, with an unindulgent wife. Not a Horror. Not a Fiend. No, almost normal.”

Furthermore, Drabble, using the traces of “primal crimes” and criminal or deviant acts as the indices of social pathology in history and in contemporary experience, revises the obsessive image of decapitation itself. On the one hand, the severed head signifies the past crimes of a savage murderer whom Drabble deliberately humanizes after the fact. In The Radiant Way, decapitation directly invoked the figure of the classical Medusa; In A Natural Curiosity, the image also encodes the ritual symbol for the separation of the seat of reason, intelligence, and the soul from the rest of the body—a meaning with sources in ancient rituals that celebrated the head as the “receptacle of the spirit.”

Although Freud drew on classical ritual and mythology, his own adaptation of the meaning of the severed head is more sexual （and misogynistic） than spiritual: decapitation signifies male castration anxiety. Freud pronounced the equation, “To decapitate = to castrate. The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something.” That “something” that induces terror for a young boy is the sight of “the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother.”

Contemporary readers may find in Drabble's preoccupation with the image of decapitation another intertextual echo. In Iris Murdoch's 1961 novel, A Severed Head, the title image carries decidedly Freudian overtones, including a misogynistic view of female sexuality. As one character in that novel comments, the severed head suggests “illicit and incomplete relationship＼s］. … Perhaps an obsession. Freud on Medusa. The head can represent the female genitals, feared not desired.” By contrast, in Drabble's A Natural Curiosity, Liz Headleand （a revisionist psychoanalyst） and Alix Bowen briefly discuss the Freudian castration complex in connection with Paul Whitmore's crimes, though Alix confesses that she does not see any connection between “the beheading thing” and Paul's relationship with his mother. Readers, left to draw their own conclusions, may feel that Drabble uses these intertextual echoes of Freud and others for narrative effect rather than psychological clarity.

Similarly, Alix's theory of the linkages between material power and human savagery is ultimately judged inconclusive, even given some theoretical support through a reference to John Bowlby, whose analyses of maternal deprivation may have, Alix admits, “brainwashed” her. Liz resists pointing out to Alix （though her thoughts are narratively expressed） that not all children who grow up in loveless or broken homes become pathological murderers; Liz, herself a victim of childhood sexual abuse, can testify that the riddles of human behavior defy such pat solutions. In pursuing Paul Whitmore's family history, Alix, rather than solving a riddle, has merely “confirmed ＼her］ own prejudices about human nature” within a closed system. As she acknowledges early in the narrative, long before Whitmore's story has unfolded, “it is almost as if she had invented ＼Paul］, as an illustration of whatever it is she wishes to discover about human nature.” One hears Drabble's own voice—if not her pretext for the narrative itself—in Alix's recognition.

Thus, in A Natural Curiosity Drabble implies that theories are intellectual abstractions that do not necessarily solve the riddles of human behavior they purport to explain. Yet the novel itself sometimes wobbles between an overly theoretical exploration of social and psychological issues and a sense of moral and intellectual inclusiveness. Drabble, attentive to the theoretical morass within which this particular text is constructed, wryly alludes （through a minor character） to the postmodern mindset in a way that suggests the pressures of irresolvability with which her own narrative wrestles: “He is … programmed to take in several story lines, several plots at once. He cannot quite unravel them, but he cannot do without the conflicting impulses, the disparate stimuli.” As Drabble circles back to reconsider and revise the “hidden knowledge” that preoccupies her characters in these paired narratives, she alternately connects and disconnects the links between plausible causes and actual effects. Whatever “human nature” is, it remains stubbornly resistant to theory and analysis, even as it invites both imaginative exploration and narrative revision. The author's own “natural curiosity” about her characters' lives compelled her to extend their concerns into a second volume that imaginatively extends, intertextually revises, and—it must be admitted—occasionally befuddles the issues that animate the narrative it succeeds.