"Ordinary Signals"

By Martha Duffy

THE NEEDLE'S EYE by MARGARET DRABBLE 368 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

After six serious, successful novels, Margaret Drabble has a major reputation in Britain, but she is not nearly so well known in the U.S. Drabble's hallmark is unadorned intelligence. Her books tend to leave one massive impression rather than memories of particular scenes. Though she is a formidable social observer, other writers organize a more effective Dreadful Dinner Party.

While she is also painstaking about domestic detail, Doris Lessing, for instance, sets a better table, and Mary McCarthy is a more telling interior decorator.

What Drabble excels in is something very difficult: the interplay between essential character and volatile emotions that occurs in individuals under stress.

Her new heroine. Rose Vassilou, might be a cousin of Jane Gray in her most recent book, The Waterfall. Rose is divorced, with three small children and a national reputation as an "eccentric." What really caused her notoriety was money. A major Midlands heiress, she had enraged her family by marrying a penniless Greek boy and giving her inheritance away to a dubious African relief fund. The family squabble made all the tabloids. Ten years later, Rose is found raising a family in a working-class district of London while her tempestuous ex-husband, now making plenty of money, bedevils her to gain custody of the children, whom he would like to enroll in the way of life she fled.

Rose is a natural mess maker. All she wants, she says, is to be left alone by the world in general, and her moody, ambitious ex-husband in particular. "I respond to such ordinary signals in the world," she explains. "Cut prices and sunshine and babies in prams and talking in the shops."

Most of the long narrative hovers around the custody crisis. What Rose is really doing is steering a plain, old-fashioned moral course. Her state-school-educated children are good kids with clear heads and unwarped values. She loves her "exhausting days" of ironing and baby sitting for neighbors. Around this serene nucleus, judges, advocates, friends and schemers swirl.

Rose finally resolves the problem by taking her husband back. Somehow things change at once. She becomes more querulous and resentful; her beloved tacky neighborhood suddenly gets chic. But her motives are still homely and consistent. She relinquishes "the spiritual calm it had been a crime to ose" because she finally cannot deprive the children of their father--or him of them.

This is the author's longest, most ambitious book, but like her others it is meandering, reflective and unromantic --low on plot, long on thoughtfulness. There is, however, one new disconcerting element. The prose is notably fussier than usual. If there were a Comma Prize, Margaret Drabble would win in a walk. sbMartha Duffy

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