Worth every penny

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman is a rare example of a dying breed: the collected short stories. Spanning from 1966 to 2000, the singularly spindly tales document the heady social change of the period in question. But more than that, they demonstrate the delightfully tricksy nature of the short story as a form: from workaday realism to postmodern artfulness, and every shade between.
 
It is easy to misread Drabble through the fog of reputation. Few living writers have the clout, or the DBEs to go with it, that both she and her sister (one A.S. Byatt) can boast by the bucketload. But, of course, the first stories in this collection speak without all of that. The nervy, rather tentative voice that comes from the early tales is that of a writer newly seated at the typewriter. Thus we have the rather heavy-handed ‘visionary gleam of meaning’ in the first story ‘Hassan’s Tower’, that old Joycean trick of epiphany (see Stevie