5 saying about women in contemporary society,the person who wants to know what is going on in technique in the modern novel,or the person who enjoys the aesthetic pleasure of the lyrical novel,a person also could read Drabble to discover the texture of contemporary British society.In her last two novels,THE ICE AGE and THE MIDDLE GROUND, part of Drabble's stated purpose was to capture the mood of the time and the particular quality of life in modern London.In her latest novel she says she is writing again about the social scene in England today.These are all good reasons to read Drabble,but none of these seems to be the primary reason that Drabble writes. Even in the early,and relatively unsophisticated, novels,Drabble was interested in philosophical issues, something she described recently in a review of Mary Gordon's latest book MEN AND ANGELS.In the March 31, 1985,edition of THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW,Drabble said,"[Mary Gordon]is reaching for a sense of wholeness, for the possibility of inclusion rather than exclusion, for a way of connecting the different passages of exis- tence,and her book asks questions rather than provides answers"(31).Drabble might well have been describing her own novels,for she also seeks a whole view and often finds only questions,those holes in our perceptions of life that insist the search continues rather than create