Janet Frame may be the most important novelist to come out of New Zealand, but her books are so unlike what we expect a novel to be that they almost evanesce into their own mysticism….

Nevertheless, she's been compared to Woolf for her impressionistic sensibility, to Rilke for her deliberate obscurity—and I'm tempted to add the names of Barnes, Nin, Mansfield, if only to suggest the rarefied atmosphere one encounters while living in the Maniototo.

The Maniototo, in essence, represents the farthest, most inaccessible reaches of personal imagination. Geography and language stand in for plot as Mavis buries two husbands in Blenheim, visits Baltimore, copes with an unexpected inheritance in the magic city of Berkeley. Coincidences and "replicas," in twos and threes, are intrinsic to these gambols among symbols….

[One] can read Living in the Maniototo as a culminating parable for Janet Frame's life in art, paying...