Books: The Inner Pit

FACES IN THE WATER (254 pp.)—Janet Frame—Braziller ($4).

To be mad, says Istina Mavet, is to know that things are far, far from what they seem. Workmen apparently digging a ditch are actually digging her grave. Peering into the depths of a mirror, she sees not her image but nothingness. Answering a phone, she hears only the voice she dreads. Even flowers nodding in the wind are not flowers but explosions caused by "sinister collisions of color."

Istina is the heroine of this largely autobiographical novel which, like The Snake Pit and a dozen other...