Lives Out of Sight
COSMAN, MAX
Lives Out of Sight Owls Do Cry. By Janet Frame. Braziller. 211 pp. 3.75. Reviewed by Max Cosman Contributor, "Commonweal," "Herald Tribune Book Review" OCCASIONALLY ONE comes upon a book that...
...Miss Frame has fashioned an impressive first novel...
...This does not necessarily mean that it is original in the sense of having been uninfluenced by what has been done in its genre before...
...A social climber and snob, she uses genteel bitchiness, separating herself not only from her parents, who in a sense no longer need her, but from Toby, her epileptic brother, and Daphne, her sister in a mental asylum, who do...
...Such a novel is Owls Do Cry...
...It has its weaknesses—a looseness of construction, for example—but these fall away before the accreted pain and sorrow, and always the utter, the naked precariousness of existence...
...Like A. E. Ellis' The Rack and Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Owls Do Cry creates a hermetic world of its own...
...Miss Frame's novel is primarily the story of the four children of a family in southern New Zealand...
...Reviewed by Max Cosman Contributor, "Commonweal," "Herald Tribune Book Review" OCCASIONALLY ONE comes upon a book that vibrates fundamental nerves...
...From it, above all, stem those terrifying scenes of Daphne's institutional life...
...Poetical, symbolical, very often tangential in her account, as if she were too aware of certain passions to do anything but glance away from them...
...Without any recourse to factitious horror or Gothicisms, it makes real the terror that accompanies the lives of those conveniently gotten out of sight either in slums and prisons or in hospitals and asylums...
...By contrast, Chicks or Teresa, the youngest, lives to become well-to-do...
...It is significant not only for its technical nuances but for its conveyance of heartbreak...
...Simple poverty is their inheritance, misfortune the dispenser of their respective tragedies...
...It does mean, however, that something in the subject or setting or manner has been projected to an extent which makes the volume as a whole different from others...
...From this skill of hers grow such painful passages as those which treat of Toby's reading of Teresa's revelatory diary...
...Francie, the eldest, barely budding into womanhood, dies when she falls into a fire at the town dump where she and the others have been wont to seek rubbishy treasure...
...Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of Miss Frame's talent is precisely in this ability to get to the core of her fate-haunted characters...
...It is the final effort of the doctors to restore her to normalcy...
...Unable to stand the strain of confrontation Toby has one of his epileptic fits...
...The whole still sad music of humanity is in an episode like that in which Toby and his father show up at Arrowtown just before Daphne is to be operated on...
...From it too come those hints of original sin: the moments when Toby hates his self-sacrificing mother and the occasions when Teresa, her pride puffed up by trumperies, wishes that same mother, and father as well, dead...
...As for his father, forced to prattle about the dead in the family as if they were alive, he cannot make Daphne understand who he is...
Vol. 43 • October 1960 • No. 38
