From Owls do Cry to The Carpathians, the novels of Janet Frame have challenged our understanding of what fiction does. In The Frame Function, Jan Cronin traces the operation of a prescriptive authorial presence within the novels to offer an engaging 'inside-out' guide to a great writer's work. Drawing on Frame's personal and professional correspondence and the dynamic between that Frame and the various Frames of the novels, Cronin explores key issues: Frame's relationship with her readers; the nature of the 'difficulty' the novels present; and the questions of intentionality Frame's work forces us to address. Each chapter offers readers a tour of one or more Frame novels: how they work; how Frame writes; and the impact these fundamentals have on readers interpreting and engaging with her work.

Readers of Frame's books frequently sense the presence of some kind of puzzle to be solved but can't quite distil its parameters. The Frame Function takes as its starting point this capacity of Frame's texts to lure the reader into looking for solutions while simultaneously deterring such behaviour. In crafting a portrait of Frame's compositional processes, Cronin provides new insights into the underlying relationship between prescriptiveness and elusiveness in Frame's work. The Frame Function is a guide for those who are intrigued, stimulated, sometimes baffled by Frame's powerful novels.

Jan Cronin is a senior lecturer in the English department at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and the coeditor of Frameworks: Contemporary Criticism on Janet Frame.