SOURCE: Kamine, Mark. “A Critic to the Core.” New Leader 73, no. 9 (9 July 1990): 18-19.

In the following review, Kamine praises Frayn's entertaining, witty, and dexterous prose in The Trick of It, stating that the central themes of the novel include the writing process and the ways in which the novelist transforms life into art.

The “trick” here is how: how a writer writes, and writes well. How life, in other words, becomes art. Thankfully, Michael Frayn is wise enough not to try to tell us, and clever enough to hold our interest anyway.

His novel [The Trick of It] is composed of a series of letters that Richard Dunnett, a critic and professor at a provincial English college, writes to a friend living in Melbourne. Dunnett's specialty is a contemporary English author—a major author, in Dunnett's opinion—and it is one of Frayn's small tricks to have Dunnett...