Paradise Lost

The Ice Age By Margaret Drabble Knopf, 295 pp., $8.95

Anna Wulf, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, thinks that the novel “has become an outpost of journalism” and that only “one novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.” Anna is a novelist suffering from writer’s block, and she laments that she is “incapable of writing” that novel. Fortunately for us, Margaret Drabble does not share her incapacity.