Weekend reflections

Grace Cleave, the protagonist of Janet Frame’s 1963 novel Towards Another Summer, is critiqued by columnist and author David Gates in The New York Times’ Sunday Book Review. “Except for David Copperfield, few novels have endured a child’s viewpoint more convincingly and affectionately,” writes Gates. “Towards Another Summer looks back to Virginia Woolf in its focus on the tortuous internal positionings beneath the surface of apparently casual conversation… And it looks ahead to Mary Gaitskill’s sense of a vivid inner ferocity.” Towards Another Summer reflects an actual weekend Frame endured in the north of England with Guardian journalist Geoffrey Morrhouse, his wife and their two children. “Like every writer worth remembering, Frame exploits — or creates on the page, to be absolutely puristic about it — her peculiar sensibility, her private window into the universal.” Although written in 1963, Towards Another Summer was not released until 2007, three years after Frame’s death.