Wrestling with the angel : a life of Janet Frame /

Frame (b. 1924) is New Zealand's most prominent writer and, indeed, one of the most prominent living writers in English; King is New Zealand's outstanding biographer. This combination results in brilliant biography, a classic study of a living writer. Part of King's success results from the relationship of trust and affection that developed between the two, part from the diligence and thoroughness King brought to his undertaking. The author bases the biography on information and letters supplied by Frame and her friends; at Frame's insistence, he offers no analysis of her writings. King succeeds in conveying Frame's personality and the details of her life more vividly and more compellingly than Frame herself in her somewhat self-conscious three-volume autobiography (1984-85; collected as The Complete Autobiography, 1990). He does an extraordinary job of depicting a personality split into contraries, timid yet uncompromising, living in a world of her own creation while simultaneously watching herself in that world and scrutinizing the external world. Frame's original vision has made her a writer apart and above, rather like Rainer Maria Rilke. Covering her life up to the turn of the 21st century, King gives the book a sense of gracious completeness that will not be lost even if Frame continues to write. All collections. J. B. Beston; formerly, Nazareth College of Rochester

Fame has been both alarming and lifesaving for Janet Frame, New Zealand's best-known writer. Shy, private, and leery of the stigma of her incarceration in psychiatric hospitals, she finally lifted the curtain on her unusual life in the 1980s when she wrote the three-volume autobiography that inspired Jane Campion's film, Angel at My Table (1990). Then in 1995, Frame, at 71 the author of 11 novels and five story collections, invited King to write a biography free of critical analysis of her work. He complied, and now presents a meticulously researched and quietly lucid account that captures the strangeness and trauma of Frame's tragedy-punctuated childhood and the appalling brutality of the treatments she endured after a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia. Saved from a lobotomy by the arrival of her first book in 1951, Frame, whose affliction, as King so gracefully reveals, was simply an artist's porousness to the world, has subsequently been watched over by mentors and friends--her angels--who recognize and treasure her rare powers and the need for solitude her lyrical and psychologically acute writing demands. --Donna Seaman

Remarkable and resilient, Janet Frame is New Zealand's most accomplished writer. She's the author of 11 novels, dozens of poems and stories and three volumes of autobiography (including the work that inspired Jane Campion's film An Angel at My Table). Now in her 70s and having suffered a stroke, she is largely silent. In this rigorously researched authorized biography, fellow New Zealander King (Death of a Rainbow Warrior) looks back over Frame's anguished life. At her request, the bookÄwhich draws from previously unavailable personal documentsÄlacks critical literary analysis (although King does note that her writing conveys the "sense that reality itself is a fiction, and one's grasp on it no more than preposterous pretense and pretension"). But the focus here is not on Frame's works; instead, King describes her life as wordsmith and survivor. In effect two books, the first half of Wrestling with the Angel is a dramatic account of Frame's struggle to survive a painful and emotionally troubled life (two of her sisters drowned, and she attempted suicide) and to write. King details Frame's early lifeÄher travels into and out of psychiatric hospitals (where her anxiety neuroses were dangerously misdiagnosed as schizophreniaÄshe narrowly escaped a lobotomy)Äas well as the writing career she began in her mid-30s. In the anticlimactic second half of the book, he describes Frame's succŠs d'estime: the literary prizes she won, the money troubles that followed and her compulsive moving from place to place (five times in one two-year period), in New Zealand and abroad, which testified to the persistence of her unexorcised anxieties. King's biography is a competent account of an unusual lifeÄthough no replacement for Frame's autobiography. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

"The Frame sisters thought of themselves as Bronts: because they held, by right, `silk purses' of words; and because their family was an anvil on which disasters fell." Such tragediesDpoverty, an epileptic, alcoholic brother, two sisters who died of heart failure while swimming, a third sister misdiagnosed a schizophrenic and hospitalized for almost ten yearsDmarked the early life of Janet Frame, New Zealand's greatest modern writer. With Frame's cooperation, fellow New Zealander King (Death of a Rainbow Warrior) has written a sympathetic and comprehensive biography, incorporating Frame's diaries, hospital records, and letters as well as quoting extensively from her memoirs (later adapted by Jane Campion into her marvelous film, Angel at My Table). Frame's story makes for dramatic and fascinating reading (she narrowly avoided a lobotomy when her first short story collection won a prize); unfortunately, there is very little analysis of how Frame transformed these painful events into literary works of great beauty and originality. This is not quite King's fault as Frame requested that he not critique her work. Still, King does U.S. readers a great service by calling attention to a unique writer who should be better appreciated here. For larger academic and public library literature collections.DWilda Williams, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.