There are themes that may be ultimately inimical to fiction. Too absolute a despair about meaningful connection between events is the death of plot. Too great a reluctance to find coherence in personality prohibits the presentation of character. Too feeble a hope of human communication is the withering, ultimately, of style. Janet Frame has sought, in six novels, to express these negative convictions with such brilliance and earnestness that she makes something, if not always a story, of them.

Still, one cannot help feeling that what she makes—call it what you will—is somehow less than her talents entitle her to. What a novelist she might be, I have felt after reading each of her books, if only her imagination were not so severely confined by her views, or, more correctly, her lack of views….

[In] "A State of Siege," the desire to see truly is, as...