The Pure Gold Baby

Jessica Speight is a young student of anthropology in 1960s London. She has an affair with a married professor and the result is her daughter Anna, a unique child with special needs and Jessica’s pure gold baby.

Jessica’s story is told by a friend who relates the stories of Jessica’s life from

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the 1960s to the present. Because Jessica is straightforward and forthright in her quest to provide Anna with the most productive and happy life possible, she is somewhat idolised by her (mostly) faceless women friends who provide much love and support. But it becomes obvious that Jessica faces the same trials and tribulations as her friends. She also struggles with work, friendships, lovers and motherhood.

But Margaret Drabble is not only writing about Jessica and Anna. Her story is much wider in scope. It is a story about society through the decades; the attitudes to women, motherhood and family; the attitudes towards mental health issues and about the changes in attitudes towards children with disabilities.

Through her skilful and considerate language Jessica and Anna become appealing characters. Their story highlights the changes in society’s attitudes through the years and acknowledges all those women who have complicated lives.

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In a novel that spans 50 years, from the early 1960s to the present, Margaret Drabble follows the lives of Jess and her daughter Anna, the pure gold baby of the title.

Jess was a budding anthropologist planning on doing field work in Africa when she became pregnant by a married man. Putting her

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career aside, she becomes instead a free lance writer so she can stay home and support and raise her child. At first Anna is seen as a perfect child; never cranky, never colicky, always cheerful. In a few years, however, it becomes clear that she is developmentally delayed, never to learn to read or do numbers, always to remain a child in mind. A very self possessed child, though; she seems to be ever calm and even unwilling to upset others, especially her mother, with her problems. All the people around her go through turmoil and change, Anna remains the still heart of the storm. The story, in fact, does not seem to be so much about her as about relationships and obligations that swirl around her as she remains her mother’s anchor.

Anna’s preeminence in Jess’s life obvious; she dumps lovers (and she has very few of them) if she feels they interfere with her relationship with Anna. Other people are background filler: Anna’s father who goes nameless until late in the book; the first person narrator about whom we know just as little and who also goes nameless until late in the story; the husband who Jess moves out of her house after just a few months but who stays in her life to help with Anna; a sort of satellite, a body with little gravity and pull.

Drabble explores many things in this novel; motherhood, friendship, commitment, the treatment of the mentally ill, aging, feminism, and more. While there is little action, the book is dense with themes. For such a quiet book, it was gripping to me and I couldn’t put it down.

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This story is about the social conscience and moral compass of a generation. It covers big topics like art, medicine, relationships, education and mental health. It is well paced and the writing is good (perhaps not to my liking but still very good). However I had some major issues with it. Reading

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this book was like talking to someone who is constantly going off on tangents. I prefer a more linear storyline and this one swirled around so much that I had no idea where it was taking me. I also felt very detached to the characters. I was an observer but I never felt conncected to any of the characters at any point. I was confused by the role of the narrator. She would be telling the story objectively as a 3rd party and then suddenly make a personel comment about her role in a particular scene. It was disorienting. I'm am sorry to say that the point of the whole story seems to have gone right over my head. Overall this book was an interesting look at the life experience of a generation but it was not a wonderful reading experience for me. - Thanks to Netgalley for giving me an opportunity to read this book.

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Review based on ARC.

Perhaps my expectations have risen too high. Or perhaps this is just another book that... had so much potential but just did not meet it.

As you'll read in every other blurb or review, Jess is an anthropology student with a bright career ahead of her. She has an affair with her

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married professor and "finds herself" pregnant... er, I mean, she got pregnant. Although that's not an altogether surprising result of having an affair with a member of the opposite gender.... I'll at least give them that this was in the 60s.. in London. So, okay, she finds herself a single mom and .. I guess it makes sense to become a free-lance writer to keep her kid fed rather than continue on an anthropology career. Sorry, I'm just a bit confused because I know actual free-lance writers and on the whole their money situation is neither good nor steady. But they do it because they love the writing and there's potential for the future. Conversely, staying in a career-oriented educational program seems like a smart decision. I have friends who went to law school w/ little babies and kids (and, yes, no dads). and sure it's hard but.... anyway, I digress.

Jess' baby Anna is the pure gold baby. Sunny, happy, and developmentally delayed. And so dubbed the Pure Gold Baby. The book spans 50 years, to the present, and we get to watch as Jess and Anna struggle (well, Jess struggles...) with every day life -- jobs, friends, men. So yeah, it's one of those kind of books that just goes on, without a plot per se -- no real climax -- just character development and ongoing life.

And as I've said before, in order for those books to really impress me, they have to ... well... really impress me. They have to be really well done (e.g., Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart). And Drabble's was fine, it was good, the writing was good, but it wasn't great. So it got kind of boring... and kind of directionless. And while I did keep reading and I was glad to have read it... and I thought that Drabble added some interesting perspectives and history about women's libbing... it didn't blow me away.

I'll agree with some of the other reviewers that perhaps the narration from Jess's friend was just a bit too detached. She was privy to more, er, inside-knowledge than you might expect (thoughts and emotions) for a non-omniscient 3rd person perspective, but it was still just a little too cold, unemotional, and.. well, detached, for my tastes.

So overall, a good book. If you're looking for something that has some history, some women's strength undertones, some discussion on developmentally disabled ... pick it up. But it's not a blow-me-away book.

THREE AND A HALF of 5 stars..
This and other reviews can be found at AllBookReviewer.Blogspot.com

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I always mix up Margaret Drabble (Brit) and Anne Tyler (American) but in the race for favorites, Tyler wins because of her gentle humor. This Margaret Drabble book is a gentle read, a tribute to mother, child, and narrator, and to the 1960s and onward in Britain. Much to like but not too much to

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love. If you want to do a Drabble, I suggest "Jerusalem the Golden" or "The Realms of Gold." I think back in those days she was a most insightful feminist, and now everyone else has caught up.

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When I first attended grad school at Baylor University, I felt pretty certain my area of research would focus on 19th century women writers – Austen, the Brontës, Gaskill, and Eliot. However the influence of time, tides, and professors I admired, shifted my vision towards other vistas.

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Nevertheless, I still have a great affection for these marvelous story tellers.

Margaret Drabble holds an exalted place in this coterie of British Women novelists. She has written 16 novels, a collection of stories, biographies of Angus Wilson and Arnold Bennett, as well as the role of editor for the 5th and 6th editions The Oxford Companion to English Literature. The dust jacket of her 17th novel informs me that for her contributions to English Literature, the Queen named her a Dame of the British Empire in 2008. Her sister is the Book-Prize winning author of Possession, A.S. Byatt.

Drabble is one of those writers who causes me to pounce on the latest novel. The Pure Gold Baby did not disappoint. Nellie narrates the story years later. She is a friend of Jessie’s, a graduate student in anthropology, who finds herself pregnant after an ill-advised affair with one of her professors. She conceals the name of the father from all her friends, and decides to raise the child, Anna, on her own. At first, Anna seems perfect. The child has great beauty, pleasant and polite personality, and she always smiles. Anna anxiously tries to please not only her mother, but the circle of friends who enclose Jessie and Anna as a protective shield.

Drabble writes detailed descriptions, mixing the ordinary with the unusual, the everyday with the rare and wonderful. She writes: “Jess walked towards Enfield Lock and the canal and the River Lee, and then began to walk, thoughtfully, reflectively, receptively, along the tow path. Anna liked the water. Anna Jess thought, would like the water walkway. The lock was old and quiet, with a stationed narrow boat and a cluster of old buildings from another age – the dark-brick lock-keeper’s cottage with white fretted wooden gables, a row of tidy little houses, a pub called the Rifles. Jess sensed there was a historic arsenal connection here, as in Highbury, a military link, but the waterside this day was peaceful in the sun. The track was overgrown with elder and buddleia and nettles, with long greens and purples. Jess walked on and through a gate and over a wooden stile, and the water flowed strongly. She had left the placid canal bank and joined the path of the deep full river. A warning notice leaning rakishly on a rotting board told her the water was deep and dangerous. Small golden-winged birds flew in swift flurries in a light June breeze through tall willows and reeds. Dark dragon flies. blue-black, hovered and coupled over the rapidly moving surface.

I learn a lot from her novels. I find myself Googling images of stiles, buddleia, and dragon flies, along with a healthy scoop of unfamiliar words. I have 14 of her novels, and I am reminded the time has come to fill out my collection. The Pure Gold Baby shows Drabble is still at the height of her power as a novelist, and clearly deserves -- 5 stars.

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A readable and interesting story centring on changing attitudes to mental illness and learning difficulties since the 1960s

I wound up reading The Pure Gold Baby, because I read The Dark Flood Rises and then realized that I had missed a couple of Margaret Drabble's recent novels, though she's one of my favorite novelists, and I wrote about her work in my dissertation.

I’ve let this lapse happen, because I think, in

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general, her later books are not as good as her earlier ones were, and I definitely think that Pure Gold Baby follows this pattern. There are long sections where nothing of any substance occurs and there’s a great deal of near repetition. Drabble is making a point here, which is that the life of a family with a special needs child is likely to be highly scheduled and lacking in a lot of dramatic action for the parent. The parent needs to be available to parent.

The ideas here are interesting, but they don’t seem to gel into fiction. As with Drabble’s other novels, readers are given quite a lot of background information, here about the history and current state of treatment options for the mentally ill and developmentally delayed. These are delivered as research that Jess, the titular “baby’s” mother, is doing largely out of interest created by daughter’s condition.

It’s never quite made clear what the condition of the main character’s daughter is. Drabble says that Anna doesn’t have Down Syndrome, but she seems permanently at a very young mental age in terms of her intellectual capabilities and her understanding of what is going on around her. She spends time at an institution and time being cared for by her mother at home. Drabble’s point seems to be that she is fortunate in that her disability leaves her, on the whole, happy. She becomes anxious sometimes, but she is not a depressed person like some of those her mother meets in the various institutions she visits. She is pleased by small things. But in the end, there remains the question of who will care for her after her mother dies.

I found the descriptions of the way that England has worked with their mentally ill interesting, though they didn’t quite blend in. Anna doesn’t have a condition that requires medication, and another person that her mother becomes involved with, Steve, is treated by a doctor who is using an approach that does not involve medication, so there is not much discussion of medication in the novel. Drabble does talk about the use of institutions, relationships between doctors and patients and issues of aging. She has discussed institutions in a number of her recent novels, a topic that really interests me. Her most recent novel discusses aging and how the state responds to the aging in England.

Drabble has always been a novelist interested in taking on political issues, and perhaps because this is a novel centered on Anna, a girl and then a woman, who not only can’t understand such issues but becomes anxious if she’s exposed to them, they remain repressed throughout much of the novel, as though we’re tiptoeing around what we don’t want the children to hear. Direct communication is also difficult, because large parts of the novel are told through the first person point of view of Anna’s mother’s friend who is not present for a lot of the action but hears about it later from Anna’s mother or some other friend. In this way, Drabble largely avoids the problem of representing Anna's speech directly, which she may have decided was too difficult. Instead, what she says is reported indirectly, "Anna said that...."

Overall, I’m glad I read this novel, even though I wouldn’t rate it nearly as highly as a book like Drabble’s Gates of Ivory. The topic is especially interesting for me at this time, though. Others may find the flaws simply annoying and put the book down.

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This is a graceful novel that explores the theme of support by family and friends through a lifetime. It is a moving account of Jess and her care for her daughter Anna, who has a medical condition that means that she can never live a solely independent life. Margaret Drabble’s touching book

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follows them from the 1960s for over 50 years and delicately highlights the continuing aid given by their family and friends, both adults and children and how this reward of friendship and help is returned by Jess and Anna which leads to a positive sense of community in their north London area.

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Drabble takes advantage of being in her seventies to write a novel with a very long time-base that has nothing at all of the constructed feel of an historical novel about it. It's rather like what she does in the Headleand Trilogy, following a set of female friendships over several decades, but

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stretched out to something like fifty years.

At the core of the story is the relationship between anthropologist and journalist Jess and her daughter, Anna, who has special needs and has to be cared for constantly. Jess has a group of women friends, including Eleanor the narrator, who all move in the same North London liberal middle-class professional world, and mostly have children of the same age. Drabble uses this to look at the way attitudes and behaviour in the group change with age and changing times (there's a lot of "...which we then still believed to be healthy"), but also as a frame on which to hang wider reflections on historical change. Through Anna, and contacts Jess makes as a result of caring for her, we learn about the ways attitudes and professional practices around mental health changed between the R.D. Laing era and Austerity, and we also move outside the strict timeframe of the book to look at - for instance - the different ways various famous writers dealt with having a "mad" family member (Jane Austen's family doesn't come out of the comparison well!).

Jess is an anthropologist for a reason, of course, and there's also a thread in the novel about our attitudes to Africa and how they have changed - Livingstone and Mungo Park are important offstage characters in this, and there are various present-day African characters who flit in and out of the story.

On the other hand, this also seems to be a novel that puts the whole idea of ageing and historical change into doubt, since Anna, the charming and lovable centre of the story, is also a person who doesn't develop emotionally or intellectually, and who doesn't experience time in the way a "normal" adult would.

I always enjoy Drabble's writing - she has a marvellous way of telling us things she feels we ought to know without ever seeming to lecture us. But this was a little bit less satisfying than some of her others, perhaps because she felt inhibited in what she could do with the character of Anna without appearing intrusive or patronising?

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Perhaps the real mystery of this book is in the cover-art. David Bailey's 1962 photograph of Jean Shrimpton in New York is admittedly rather lovely, but since the story has absolutely nothing to do with New York, models, the swinging bit of "swinging sixties", or streetcars, it's not easy to see the relevance. Odd, when this is a book where quite a number of significant photographs play a part in the story, that they should hit upon one that doesn't...

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not much happens in this novel. Jess has a mentally challenged daughter who is the pure gold baby. This novel is about their life together told by a third person who is a friend. A started skipping pages three quarters of way through this novel.

Margaret Drabble has always been a favourite of mine. But NOT this time.
I hate this book (2 stars cuz of her writing skills). I have a brain-damaged daughter (now age 54) who is definitely GOLD to me. But real life is so different. This book is a jumbled up cartoon. I hate even paragraphs that make

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rearing & living with a brain damaged child - a comforting, joy-filled "piece of cake". A passive child who never causes a speck of fuss and smiles all the time because she is heading no where, has no ambitious drive. Ooo, the more I think of this book the more outrage floods me. Perhaps that's the gig--to take our minds off the real world's outrages.

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