Secret Lives : Books: British novelist Margaret Drabble keeps finding closets full of skeletons in the bourgeoise life styles of ordinary people.

When her name comes up among Serious Readers, there is a knowing nod, and perhaps a significant pause. “I wasn’t crazy about the last couple of books,” one such ghost of the fiction stacks confided. “But she’s definitely an icon.”

So much so, in fact, that when tickets for a rare U.S. reading by British novelist Margaret Drabble went on sale here, they were sold out within six hours. Many of those in the largely female audience who packed the Brattle Theater, just off Harvard Square in Cambridge, looked as if they might have stepped out of one of her 11 novels. Tweedy, they wore clothes that no doubt pleased their middle-aged friends and embarrassed their teen-aged children. They clung to every syllable Drabble read from her latest book, “A Natural Curiosity” (Viking).

Maybe these readers lead lives like Drabble’s Alix, an ex-social worker who has “adopted” a murderer in a maximum-security prison. Maybe they too bring “their” murderers books on ancient Roman civilization.

Or maybe they are like Liz, the psychologist, whose brother-in-law has just killed himself. Where is the bereaved widow, Shirley, Liz’s sister? Why, off in Paris, visiting the Musee d’Orsay and having an affair with a man she met several days ago.

Maybe they regularly commit adultery (or look the other way when someone else does) or traipse off to Cambodia in search of missing acquaintances. Maybe their husbands insult their cooking at dinner parties, and they, in turn, berate their husbands’ love making. Maybe they are estranged from their adult children.

Ordinary people?

“What is an ordinary person?” Drabble challenged on her first visit to this country to promote a book. “I deeply believe there is no such thing as an ordinary person. If we were to actually know the ‘ordinary person,’ we would be amazed by their thoughts and dreams and fears and fantasies.”

Hidden behind “what seems to be a nice bourgeois life style, there are all kinds of skeletons,” she went on. “Each person’s witness is particular.”

If odd, unpredictable things happen on the pages of a Drabble novel, “it just shows that anything can happen to anyone.” And if strange things do not happen in a real person’s daily life, it’s probably because “most of us are constrained by our inhibitions.”

Her characters, Drabble said, are “partly amalgams of people I know and attitudes of people I know,” and partly creatures of her own creation. In the case of the three main characters in “A Natural Curiosity”--and in its precursor, “The Radiant Way,” as well--”they began from a fairly abstract point of view, with three characters representing three different points of view.”

Not surprisingly, Margaret Drabble looks a bit like one of those characters herself. She is nearly 50, with porcelain-blue eyes and dark blond hair cropped in a schoolgirl’s bob. She wears eminently sensible flat shoes and a comfortable tweed skirt. She went to Cambridge, married young, had children, divorced, remarried. And there are details of her personal life that resemble elements from one of her own novels. For example, she and her husband, Michael Holroyd, keep separate houses.

In London, she explained, “he has his house and I have mine.” Recently, they bought a third, in the country, “where we do spend time together.”

Holroyd, a biographer, is at work on the final volume of a three-book study of George Bernard Shaw. “His house is full of Bernard Shaw,” Drabble said, leaving little room for her. Besides, she said, living separately may just be a good idea on principle.

“I think it would suit everybody,” Drabble said. “I think everybody needs privacy.” Now she reveals what Times book critic Richard Eder called her “caustic social wit,” opining that “the failure to do this is what gives us our high divorce rate.”

If people are unhappy in their marriages, Drabble contends, “let them all get out and do better again.”

In any case, she went on, “a divorce is not necessarily a tragedy. You may have had a few good years.” And furthermore, “I think there is nothing worse than a conventional marriage.”

Like their maker, Drabble’s characters are often prone to saying and doing surprising things. “Occasionally, yes,” she said. “Occasionally, I think they have gone a bit too far.”

But always, even when they advocate the abolition of the age of sexual consent or plan dinner parties with drinks named after Celtic deities, they remain “within the margin of possibility. They don’t do anything completely out of the realm of the possible,” Drabble said.

Without sounding lofty, Drabble ascribes to the novelist the task of recording contemporary social history. “I think the sociologists tell one truth, the historians another and the novelists yet another,” she said. “Perhaps in between is what really happened.”

In examining the microcosm--relationships of individuals--set against large events like the Khmer Rouge dictatorship of Pol Pot, “I try to do a fairly broad picture from different corners of society,” Drabble said. Sometimes when she begins a book, “I set out with a fairly grand scheme, but I don’t always feel that I’ve accomplished it.”

She draws strongly on the lessons of writers before her. On the table in her hotel room is her recreational reading for this trip, “The Odyssey” and a collection of poems by Rimbaud. Her characters quote from Tacitus and Shakespeare, even the more obscure plays, like “Titus Andronicus.” Now she summons up Emile Zola, paraphrasing because in Zola’s day, “they didn’t talk about things like microcosms and macrocosms.” Zola, said Drabble, “said something like ‘I am haunted by a passion for the accurate detail,’ ” which is to say, she believes, that “from the springboard of facts, the facts spring.”

Thus, Drabble writes about what people wear, the climate, the food people eat, the furniture, the wines they drink. “If you get enough microcosm,” she said, “you produce the macrocosm. That is how you arrive not at the parochial, but at the universal.”

Unapologetic to a fault, Drabble’s characters seldom suffer from the plague of so much contemporary fiction, angst.

“I think we have enough angst, “ Drabble said. “I think it is quite good to write about people who are not too full of angst.

“I wrote a lot about angst when I was younger, and I got slightly bored with it,” she said. “I think as you get older, you realize you may as well live as you want. Life is certainly richer that way.”

Drabble was younger, much younger, when she took up writing fiction. But she came upon it accidentally, out of boredom.

“What happened was that I married my first husband, an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and immediately became pregnant.” Drabble was 21, and staying home every night while her husband was out acting, she grew restless. “I just started to write. I didn’t make a decision to write a novel,” she said. “It just sort of happened.”

She was stunned when, at 23, that first book was accepted for publication. As a child, she and her sisters wrote their own family magazine and Christmas plays, and at Cambridge, “I used to write the odd poem or short story, but they were never any good.” Her writing career simply evolved.

Along with her novels, Drabble has written a biography of Arnold Bennett and a book called “A Writer’s Britain.” In 1980, seeking a “diversion, a relaxation” after the publication of her ninth novel, she accepted a job as editor of “The Oxford Companion to English Literature.”

“I was just 40,” Drabble said. “It seemed just the right age to take on a project like that.” As it happened, “it was like going back to university and doing properly all the things that one had skated through.”

But now Drabble is back to fiction, back to examining what she calls “the failure of the social experiment of the West.” A third, “but very different” volume featuring the familiar cast of characters will focus largely on Cambodia, allowing Drabble to look once again at “the atrocity stories, the horrors within.”

Life abounds in such terrors, she said, the petty atrocities and the grand atrocities. “I try to make the link between them,” she said.

“Why is it we love violence so much?” she wondered. “We do just love it. The bigger the story, the more dead, the happier we are. But why? I don’t know.

“Is human nature really deeply nasty, and is it possible that we are all equally nasty?” Drabble says she has not answers, but “I admit that I have a morbid curiosity.”

Once called “the Mary Quant of literature” for her ability to write serious novels that nevertheless win popular acceptance, Drabble agrees that her characters and her settings are “quite British.” But their appeal seems to leap the Atlantic with little difficulty.

“Perhaps they are quite simply characters of our time,” she said.

Whoever they are, they do seem to tumble forth from the old manual typewriter she carries almost everywhere.

“I just sit and transcribe,” she said, to describe the way she writes. “I get quite cheerful and communicative. A strange process.”