Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame

And listening to their father say about Francie, the children felt afraid, as if suddenly the walls of the house would collapse and the roof disappear and leave them, naked, with nothing to shut them away from the world, and the  world in one stride would walk in and take possession of them, holding them tight in his hand of rock and lava, as if they were insects, and they would have to struggle and kick and fight to escape and make their way. and each time they made their way and the world had dropped them for a while to a peaceful hiding place, it would again seize them with a burning one of its million hands, and the struggle would begin again and again and go on and on and never finish.

The Withers family of Waimaru, New Zealand: Father Bob and Mother Amy, and the children, Francie, Toby, Chicks, Daphne. Each of them grows up among the stultifying conformity of this small town in their own way, each a little strange. Toby is an epileptic, and his disease puts him outside the bounds of normal society; he grows up to work in the "tip," the garbage dump, where as a child he used to hunt for treasures. Chicks is a little strange in her vicious insistence on being normal; her section of Owls Do Cry is a long journal in which she confesses her desire to fit in with the respectable neighbor company, until she learns that one respectable neighbor has respectably murdered another one. As the oldest, Francie is the first to grow up into this world and face a life of working at the woollen mill, where the local lower-middle-class is condemned to its particular shape of narrow life. It's Francie who is the first to learn of the "time of living" in which people are slotted by life into their little niches:

But in all her knowing, she had not learned of the time of living, the unseen always, when people are like the marbles in the fun alley at the show; and a gaudy circumstance will squeeze payment from their cringing and poverty-stricken fate, to give him the privilege of rolling them into the bright or dark box, till they drop into one of the little painted holes, their niche, it is called, and there roll their lives around and around in a frustrating circle.

Here I will issue the customary SPOILER ALERT because I have to talk about the moment that I knew Janet Frame's novel was something special: after a quarter of the book devoted to Francie and her the particular struggles of her coming of age, she accidentally falls down the side of the garbage dump, where she's taken her siblings to forage, into a garbage fire, and dies. It's Francie's death that makes her strange, that puts her outside the margins of society and makes her like Toby, and it continues to haunt the other three siblings as they grow up. To Daphne, the youngest sibling, who spends most of the novel inside a mental institution, Francie never really dies. Daphne's mental state is not one that understands or permits death, at least not in the usual way. There's something incredibly bold about including both Toby and Daphne, and whether they differ in the unusualness of their perspective by kind or degree, I'm not really sure.

Daphne's story has a special resonance when you know a little about Janet Frame, the legendary Kiwi author. In and out of institutions herself for much of her life, Frame was scheduled to undergo a lobotomy when she received notification that a collection of her stories had been accepted for publication, the news of which made her doctors decide maybe it would be better not to remove a hunk of her brain. Daphne undergoes the procedure that Frame never did, and her final section of the book--in which her father comes to visit her, for the first time in years, right before the operation--is one of the book's most shocking and original moments.

Owls Do Cry blew me away. It reminded me a little of Patrick White, her counterpart across the Tasman Sea, who also wrote about altered states of understanding and the way epiphany emerges amid the repressive qualities of modern middle-class life. It reminded me, too, of N. Scott Momaday in the way that Frame folds in multiple modes and points-of-view that vary the voice and tone, like Chicks' diary. But it reminded me, too, of the great modern masters like Joyce--if what this is is "stream-of-consciousness," it's among the best of it. I found Owls Do Cry in turns shocking, tragic, bewildering, and profoundly funny. One of my favorite experiences every year is discovering a new author that makes me say, I want to read everything they've ever read, and Janet Frame is one of two for me this year, along with Rikki Ducornet. Really looking forward to that.