Miss Drabble makes her books, carefully and consciously, as her heroines make their lives. She tells rather than shows, and she always knows very clearly what she is doing. [Jerusalem the Golden], like her others, goes over some very familiar ground, and persuades us that we never looked at it closely enough before: the everyday stuff of contemporary middle-class life is both funnier and more serious than one might think…. [Miss Drabble] is never condescending or dismissive.

Such coolness has its dangers. Her style is sometimes too formal, almost mandarin…. Miss Drabble is too good to be judged by any but the highest standards, and by the highest standards [some of the writing] is altogether too soft and singsong. Luckily it is exceptional. Most of her sentences are lucid and elegant: intelligence shines out of every paragraph.

For all its comedy, Jerusalem the Golden is in some ways...