Takapuna Domestics (Gifted and Frank Sargeson's Stories) (Book Review‪)‬

Review of Gifted, by Patrick Evans (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2010) and Frank Sargeson's Stories, by Frank Sargeson, introduction by Janet Wilson (Auckland: Cape Catley, 2010). I first read Frank Sargeson's stories in 1986, while taking a New Zealand Literature paper with Lawrence Jones at the University of Otago. With admirably forking lecture outlines, Jones set out a bifurcation in New Zealand's mid-century literary culture that he defined as 'barbed wire and mirrors'. Barbed wire stood for the masculine realist tradition of hard-bitten, inarticulate narrators marked by the experience of the Great Depression, physical labour, and war, while mirrors represented the more feminine impressionist tradition of imagination, dense interiority and verbal lushness. Sargeson was the seminal figure in the former, dominant tradition, and Robin Hyde and Janet Frame the key figures in the more marginal tradition.