SOURCE: "When the Spell Works It's Binding," in The New York Times Book Review, August 8, 1965, p. 4.

Sheed is a British novelist, editor, columnist, and critic. In the following review, he praises Frame's The Adaptable Man, considering the novel "comic, intense, [and stylish."]

The New Zealand authoress Janet Frame is a "witch-novelist" who stirs her plots under a full moon and has various magic powers, including a number-one witch's curse. Her prose style is a series of charms and incantations, passwords repeated in a baleful voice, which hex up the whole landscape, turning the vegetables into people and the people back into vegetables, or worse: into rock formations, soap advertisements or ancient ruins.

These alchemistic tricks are central to her new novel, [The Adaptable Man,] which concerns the urge of people and things to adapt, to assume the right shapes for the 20th century. Each of her characters would...