SOURCE: "Ordeal at Cliffhaven," in The New York Times Book Review, October 8, 1961, p. 36.

Pick is an Austrian-born novelist, editor, and translator. In the following review, he discusses the literary device of allegory as it pertains to Frame's Faces in the Water.

When Miss Frame's first book, Owls Do Cry, appeared a year ago, it was hailed as the first important novel to come out of New Zealand. Her new novel [Faces in the Water] is an equally remarkable achievement. Presented as the memoir of a cured mental patient, its blend of on-the-spot observation and hindsight, far from weakening the immediacy of the writing, strengthens its power. A disturbing book, it grows confusing only when the author permits her apparent love of poetical metaphor to invade her prose, with the result that the reader is left wondering to which plane of experience these lyricisms belong.

The narrator of the...