[In "The Reservoir," the first volume of a collection of Miss Frame's shorter works], the inference is that the Welfare State has lighted up the dark places of the soul without filling the emptiness. People die without having really lived, and those who make a try at life are usually disappointed….

People pursue a dream and then, when it is within reach, are afraid to grasp it. A middle-class timidity rules, but since the author does not connect the failures of society with the failures of people, the modern idiom is missing and many of the stories stop just when you wish they would start making ripples. Perhaps half of them are not true short stories so much as incidents and character sketches in which the saturnine mood becomes a cliché….

Death fascinates Miss Frame. Almost a third of the stories include the word in the final paragraph...