Selection rethink would only enhance reputation

Prizes: Selected Short Stories By Janet Frame. Photo / Supplied

I know we are supposed to genuflect before the works of Janet Frame, without demur, and by and large these stories do scintillate with her rare gift of observation and expression.

The 42 pieces here cover the span of her writing life and the selection is a worthy one. I recall first reading The Lagoon and Other Stories - still have the 1961 Caxton Press edition I bought in the 1970s - and something in the way she saw the world askew caught my mind as it did thousands of others.

Just over half the stories from The Lagoon are in the present collection and the title story still mesmerises with its artful whiff of scandal.

Certainly it confirms the claim by Professor Ian Richards in his introduction that she was "breathtakingly assured"; but some of the other stories here seem, in retrospect, to be less mature. Other stories are from three other collections: Snowman Snowman: Fables and Fantasies, The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches and You are Now Entering the Human Heart.

Five stories are previously uncollected. Few readers will be able to resist the fabled truths of The Terrible Screaming, The Mythmaker's Office, The Daylight and the Dust and especially One Must Give Up.

Riding her imagination, they will be taken into some unexpected, often uncomfortable places. But stories such as My Cousins Who Could Eat Cooked Turnips, Swans and The Reservoir brought about the onset of impatience in me, a sense that their time has gone. As I read My Cousins Who Could Eat Cooked Turnips, I seemed to be on a repeat journey, once too often, through the neurosis of childhood, a journey she may have re-imagined and defined better than most, but nevertheless it was a journey we have all made not only for ourselves again and again but for others on our way through New Zealand literature.

The tribulations of growing up have been an obsession among our writers and, while it has produced some memorable writing, it has also become a tad tedious. This is not so much a great place to bring kids up as a great place to write about kids going through the arduous struggle of bringing themselves up. This unease, this impatience, with the extreme introspection and hyper-sensitivity lasted all through Prizes and some other stories too.

Perhaps the time has come for reappraisal. Frame's reputation won't suffer. The lode of her work is so rich that to drop off some of the lesser tales won't matter at all. Once back in the grown-up stories, I found her at her enchanting best. And it was a treat to read the uncollected stories, starting with the brilliantly allusive Lolly-Legs.

Well, maybe it was me and the mood I was in at the weekend but, there, I've said it.

Prizes: Selected Short Stories
By Janet Frame (Vintage $35)

* Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.