The Visit - Janet Frame Gets Major Review in New York Times Sunday Book Review
By DAVID GATES, Published: May 14, 2009

Early in Samuel Beckett’s trilogy of novels, the inwardly articulate but outwardly brutish derelict Molloy, used to being immured in his own lurching, stinking body — a pearl of consciousness in an oyster of physicality — tells of finding himself “reduced to confabulation” with a policeman. “What are you doing there? he said. I’m used to that question, I understood it immediately. Resting, I said. Resting, he said. Resting, I said. Will you answer my question? he cried.” The encounter ends in Molloy’s being taken into custody, as a crowd gathers to watch the spectacle. “Was there one among them,” Molloy wonders, “to put himself in my place, to feel how removed I was then from him I seemed to be, and in that remove what strain, as of hawsers about to snap?”

The New Zealand Listener
Janet Frame

TOWARDS ANOTHER SUMMER
By Janet Frame
216 pp. Counterpoint. $24



Illustration by Aude Van Ryn



Grace Cleave, the protagonist of Janet Frame’s 1963 novel “Towards Another Summer” — considered too personal to be published during her lifetime (she died in 2004) — isn’t quite in the Molloy zone. Though she’s also a solitary, she attends to her personal hygiene, lives in a London flat with dowdy floral-covered furniture, has enough success as a “self-styled” writer to publish stories in The New Yorker and to sit, however uncomfortably, for interviews with the BBC and with a well-meaning, not-too-bright journalist from the north of England. But her very name suggests how removed she, too, is from who she seems to be: her over-busy inner life severs her from normal human interactions, and when reduced to confabulation what little grace she has deserts her. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she tells the BBC producer. “What are my books about? How should I be able to tell? My style? What does it matter?”
Grace, stuck between Parts 2 and 3 of a new novel, gets a jaunty invitation to a weekend with the journalist and his wife (and their two young children, whom he omits to mention): “Do you know the temperature is point one-five degrees warmer in Relham than in London. Come and bask in it! Philip Thirkettle.” Such casual expeditions are “not simple matters for Grace; nothing is simple if your mind is a fetch-and-carry wanderer from sliced perilous outer world to secret safe inner world. . . . In these circumstances it needed courage to go among people, even for 5 or 10 minutes.” Yet she goes, and returns to write “the story of the weekend.”

If this seems like a setup for social ­disaster, comic mishap or sexual farce, I haven’t yet made clear just how inner Grace’s inner world is. Since her radical reticence prevents her from making all but the smallest missteps, nothing happens at all during the weekend, unless you count some conversations so clumsy they send her to bed early, where she weeps alone at her ineptness.
Read the complete review at NYT.