[Pippett is a British editor, biographer, and critic. In the following review, she finds that Frame expresses "an underlying truth about our common humanity" in Faces in the Water.]

A prefatory note states that this book, [Janet Frame's Faces in the Water,] although in documentary form, is a work of fiction. This claim to be true in outline and essence is amply justified. As a report on mental hospitals in New Zealand it checks with accounts from many countries about similar conditions of overcrowding and shortage of adequately trained staffs. As a novel it carries conviction because the author has artistic integrity and intuitive understanding. She is firmly in control of her material and sure of her direction, as the unfortunate girl who here tells her own story of nine years of physical confinement and mental confusion so piteously was not.

The choice of the odd name of Estina Mavet for her hapless heroine is an indication of Miss Frame's skill, for it immediately suggests divergence from the normal, since no other character in the story, mad or sane, is so outlandishly identified. But Estina's apartness from her real self and from other people was not complete. At times reduced to almost subhuman level, she retained some awareness of her plight; she knew she was mad, in a madhouse, but she was not an idiot, a contented babbler.

Miss Frame can command the nightmare images of delusion but she uses them with restraint to increase their effectiveness. She never allows Estina to attempt an explanation or pretend a feeling beyond her limited capacity. Thus we are not told what caused the "great gap [which] opened in the ice floe" and cut Estina adrift from reality, though there are hints in the account of a confused love-hate attitude towards a nurse that point to the possible disturbing factor of an unresolved conflict with her mother and jealousy of a happily married sister.

However, we can only guess at explanations, for Estina seems to have had very little psychiatric help. Doctors flit hurriedly past, too busy to pay much attention to any one patient. Their orders are relentlessly enforced; protests are unavailing. Treatment, including electric shock, is therefore not understood as curative in purpose but as punishment for unknown offenses. Relaxation of stricter rules, removal from one category to another as the disease tightens or loosens its grip are equally inexplicable to a sufferer staggering under a self-imposed load of fear and guilt.

We do not know how Estina eventually regained her reason and her freedom, but we see the first glimmer of light in her darkness when she writes, "We all see the faces in the water" (that is, drowning people in need of help), "and sometimes we see our own face." Thus Miss Frame uses an illusion in a sick mind to express an underlying truth about our common humanity. Her novel by its objectivity and its coherence takes us through an inferno but releases us at last to sweet upper air.