The pleasure of reading a realistic novel is the satisfaction of verifying that the world we think we know is known in common….

You know you're reading a realistic novel when you find yourself thinking about its themes and characters as if they also existed apart from the novel. Margaret Drabble's Kate Fletcher [of The Middle Ground] is a product of the Sixties, a feminist journalist now getting tired of her calling. She has sexual dealings with various men, for reasons most people would find uncompelling. The differences between her husband Stuart and her lover Ted are trivial. London, a pregnancy, an abortion, a dinner party, a TV program about women from Kate's hometown: these matters make chapters in the novel and episodes in Kate's life. The novel certainly invites us to ask: would it be like that, given the circumstances and the people? The official theme of The Middle Ground is the middle years, "caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future has not yet thinned out." Kate's most intense relation is with herself, and especially with her feelings of irritation, pointlessness, her sense of being the victim of the rhetoric she has turned into a career; feminism, as it happens, but it wouldn't matter or change things if it were something else….

Drabble's theme is not boredom but the morbid nervousness that goes with it.

Realism asks you to take an interest in this theme and in the characters who deal with it…. Drabble invites us to read [the characters'] minds, but those texts are not very interesting. (p. 20)

The problem the writer of a realistic novel faces is that if the reader gives up believing in the fiction, all is lost: the same effect is reached by giving up caring. Reading The Realms of Gold, I gave up believing when Drabble offered me the … proof of Frances's feeling for her lover Karel…. In this passage Drabble has merely conspired with Frances's pretentions, she has not exerted any intelligent pressure upon them. The reader is urged to swoon with the prose, and to let the swoon take the place of earned belief or valid conviction. The empurpled equivalent of the passage comes in The Middle Ground mostly near the end, a difficult place for many novelists and requiring more vigilance than Drabble brings to it:

Excitement fills her, excitement, joy, anticipation, apprehension. Something will happen. The water glints in the distance. It is unplanned, unpredicted. Nothing binds her, nothing holds her. It is the unknown, and there is no way of stopping it. It waits, unseen, and she will meet it, it will meet her. There is no way of knowing what it will be. It does not know itself. But it will come into being.

It is hard to avoid calling this trash. But Drabble has also written well, within severely restricted limits of merit, and there is no reason to think that she is permanently afflicted with the gaucherie of her high style. It is nicer to assume that the air of forced significance which disables her writing in The Middle Ground is a symptom of her false relation to the realistic novel. On the evidence of this book, she is in bad faith with the realism she professes. She merely goes through the motions of belief, and winks at the reader from time to time to indicate that she is not taken in by the rhetoric she practices. I can't think of any other reason to explain why she has given the reader so many occasions not to believe and not even to care about not believing. (pp. 20-1)