SOURCE: "Nature as Status," in Saturday Review, April 19, 1969, pp. 41-2.

In the review below, Haynes offers a mixed assessment of Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room, finding in it a "virtuosity" that eventually "wears thin."

The New Zealand Novelist Janet Frame is an obsessed mourner at the grave of the ancient mysteries that once linked the individual and his group in a tradition of man's oneness with the universe. [Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room] seems intended as a parable of our grievous separation from the mythic past. Yet its hold on the form is shaky; I find it more satisfying when read as an inquiry—by a compulsively directed poetic imagination—into the darkness that lies beneath our supposed enlightenment. Story is not so much side-stepped as skewed to serve the author's preoccupations: reversals of symbolic meaning; contradictions in our perception of what is real (sanity, health...