SOURCE: "Needles & Pins," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 453, October 17, 1963, pp. 5-6.

In the following excerpt, Auchincloss provides a mixed review of the collections The Reservoir and Snowman, Snowman.

Janet Frame's anomalous stories and fables, thirty-eight of them, come boxed and showily bound in two volumes, [The Reservoir and Snowman, Snowman], urgently suggesting that should demurrers be raised as to just what they are, they are at any rate Art. Leaving aside labels, what are they on their own highly individual terms? Their author is a richly gifted writer in shaky control of her gifts; in fact, the gifts have the upper hand much of the time. But when these pieces work, some of life's sad truths come smiling out of them. One gives one's consent. When they don't, the self-indulgent writing and suffocating self-absorption are too much for their diaphanous themes.

One of the best...