Prizes: The Selected Stories of Janet Frame
How larky Frame’s stories of childhood in New Zealand seem at the outset. Nature is a realm of sensuous pleasure, liberation from the self and others, risks worth taking, and infinite mystery. Frame’s language lilts and loops like nursery rhymes, and, like those old, loaded songs, is weighted with a deadly undertow. “See the lagoon,” a grandmother says repeatedly to the narrator in the title story of Frame’s first collection, The Lagoon (1951), a directive with chilling allusions. That indelible tale launches this superlative posthumous gathering of selected stories (following Frame’s heretofore unpublished novel Towards Another Summer, 2009) drawn from Frame’s four collections and including five uncollected tales. Whether she’s writing about the wild, the magic of movies, a man obsessed with electricity, or the decision to stop absorbing news of the world, Frame is mythic, slyly funny, and psychologically dead-on. And just as wryly critical of herself as of others, most astringently in “Prizes,” a tale about the intrusiveness of success. Laced with startling observations and leaps of the imagination, Frame’s gracefully excoriating stories are iridescently alive. --Donna Seaman