Bewildering Benevolence

Janet Frame’s novel Living in the Maniototo is included in a Wall Street Journal’s ‘Novel Approaches to Kindness’ ‘Five Best Books’ feature as one of the “oddest acts of kindness in fiction.” “It seems not even to have happened in the story being told,” Linda Grant explains. “The unnamed narrator is lent a house in Berkeley by admirers who want to give her the peace and quiet she needs to write while they are on a tour of Italy. Alas, she has to share the place with two other couples — Americans — whom she describes with characteristic economy: ‘If it hadn’t been for the practice known as the Great Californian Confession (the G.C.C.) I might not have gleaned so much about my guests.’ Then news comes that the owners have been killed in an earthquake and have left the house to her. The legacy turns into a squabble over ownership, until you realize that the other houseguests are imaginary and that the house itself may not exist. The narrator has made them up to distract herself from the anxiety of composition. This is one of the great novels about the act of writing — complexities abound, but there is no missing the clarity of the central passion. ‘I have to cry out here,’ the narrator says, ‘that language is all we have for the delicacy of truth and telling, that words are the real heroes and heroines of fiction.’” Living in the Maniatoto was published in 1979.