A Gap in the Spectrum

Sir: No one who has studied Landfall reviews over the past ten years would be so naïve as to expect in your pages a considerate or gentle treatment of a first novel by a New Zealand novelist. Ungenerosity is the norm. How otherwisepage 401 are we to avoid that dreaded double standard of criticism?

How right it is, too, that a special severity should be extended in the case of a first novel by a woman! I was deeply delighted by the quiet surgical butchery which one of your reviewers performed recently on The Race by Ruth France. A genuine hysterectomy. But I must congratulate even more your reviewer, Paul Day, for his arbitrary and obtuse review, in your September issue, of A Gap in the Spectrum, by Marilyn Duckworth. In two hundred words he has given a rough inaccurate synopsis of the plot of the book; and added the illuminating rider that he does not know what the book is about. A publisher’s blurb could not have done less. He has succeeded in missing every signpost which indicates a serious or satirical intention – the resemblance of the imaginary country of Micald to certain closely-walled suburban areas of our own beloved Pig Island; the implicit compassion of the ‘nightmarish’ asylum sequence; all comment on the battle of the sexes; and the possible symbolic implications of the hair-dyeing episode. Very properly he assumes that because the style is simple the author must be simple-minded.

I am not suggesting that A Gap in the Spectrum should be considered a neglected masterpiece. It is rather a matter of neglected education. Marilyn Duckworth’s novel belongs to a well-known genre: let us call it, for brevity, the female picaresque, a variety of the literature of protest developed, for example, by Charlotte Brontë, Virginia Woolf, and Colette.

I applaud again your reviewer’s intention. As a Christian gentleman and pub-trained Pig Islander, I am firmly of the opinion that the female psyche was invented by Freud, and will cease to exist if we tell it plainly enough that we do not like or understand it. But one needs to know a little more than Mr Day in order to put on the black cap successfully.

1959 (206)