"Living in the Maniototo" could hardly be more different from the fiction that readers may have come to expect from [Janet Frame's] part of the world. Its subject is New Zealanders when they're at home, not in a Maori tourist paradise but in a horrible suburb called Glenheim, where the suicide rate is high and the windowless shopping mall is named Heavenfield….

"Living in the Maniototo" is held together by the consciousness of its narrator, a consciousness as elastic and snappy as a handful of rubber bands. This is no mere double heroine: on the first page we're given the choice of no fewer than 12 possible identities. True, only about four of them are explored in any depth, but the others remain as shadowy potentials. Who can tell what rabbit may pop next from the hat?

The heroine is, simultaneously: Mavis, an ordinary woman who uses the fact...