Books: The Slipcase Syndrome

THE RESERVOIR and SNOWMAN, SNOWMAN by Janet Frame. 364 pages. Braziller. $7.00.

It is a fairly good rule of thumb to avoid books that come in cardboard slipcases, just as a practiced reader automatically avoids the memoirs of actresses, novels described by their publishers as heartwarming, and books given prepublication endorsements by Clifton Fadiman. The rule is not absolute, but more often than not the contents of a slipcase either have calcified into the classic condition or are so fragile that they need an especially strong container to keep them from crumbling. Most of Janet Frame’s stories, sketches and fables in these two prettily boxed booklets fit the second case.

Like her excellent (and unboxed) novel, Faces in the Water, the short pieces collected here deal with failure, loneliness, quiet despair, and the rubble-filled borderland between sanity and madness. But there was strength in the novel, and there is none in the stories.

There are two versions of the same story about artistic talent going stale in youthful marriage, several reworkings of the theme that radio and telephone systems are the apparatus of loneliness. More childhood memoirs than one would wish end with rhetorical queries to the Infinite. The collection’s showpiece is a long fable called Snowman, Snowman. It concerns a snowman who thinks long, long thoughts while slowly melting in the front yard of a middle-class New Zealand family. These scraps suggest not a dark night of the soul but a sun-filled afternoon, with curtains blowing drowsily at the window, a stack of clean paper on the desk, a typewriter at hand, and nothing to say.