Reading Alice Tawhai reminded me of reading Janet Frame's first collection You Are Now Entering the Human Heart. And maybe it reminded me a little of Frank Sargeson, also. It had the freshness and skewed oddness that to me speak of the best New Zealand fiction.

Tawhai writes like a dream, sometimes a child’s dream, sometimes an adolescent’s, sometimes that of a kind of Sweetie idiot.

“As he drove up on the clear mornings, the mountains looked like desserts where someone had whacked white frosting roughly on top with a spatula and not smoothed it out.”

“Ulrika’s skin was pale as porcelain, the delicate biscuit kind that breaks so easily. It was so sheer that the blush below it rose easily, and when she shut her eyelids, the tiny veins in them were visible, like the deep blue of the fjords and rivers of her homeland, trapped underneath the winter ice.”

Characters are usually living in the ‘margins of life’: Italian immigrants working in a carnival, an 18 year-old from Lebanon, a Japanese woman ordered through a catalogue, the Chinese Mrs. Lin, who works her family vegetable market in Auckland. Many are Maori.

As Tawhai writes of one character, so might she say of all: “Sundae was a man with no last name and no birth certificate. That didn’t stop him from being entitled to a history.”

Young boys develop violent sides, young girls bear and lose children almost accidentally. The girls reminded me of early Frame girls in their great emotional depth, and also their distance from ‘normalcy’ -- their escape into the fantastic. Slow-witted Vera is “born special:” she collects starfish, and tries to learn their language; she gorges on lollies and fairy bread, she doesn’t realise she is pregnant until she actually gives birth to baby Little Starfish.

People look for God but do not find God. Or they find God in other things. “Sailor,” claims one girl who has searched for God and not found Him, “came into my heart the way I thought that God would.”

Often God is in the details, in the strands of Vera’s coral-like waving fibre-optic light, in another’s description of the eating of mushroom lollies: “They’re fat, puffy white things, dyed green, orange or yellow on top, and rolled in shredded coconut. The stalks are white as well, like cigarette filters. They taste of sweet chalk and baby birthdays.”

An anorexic joins up with a man in search of the extraterrestrial. At the rotunda by the river, kids breathe from plastic bags, glue “daubed around the outside of their lips, so that they looked like stoned clowns.”

Tawhai has a fantastic eye for description. Like Frame’s trees, which smelled of peanut butter (and hence caused her to thought mad), Tawhai’s descriptions are just beyond the edge of ‘normalcy.’

“Afternoon was turning to evening, and the last of the sun, as golden as a pool of urine, was slipping down between the dark green hills…”

“The sky up at Seaview is like all the sky in the South Island: shot with sour milk. Blue yes, but a paler, more washed out, yet more intense blue. As if someone had tipped milk that has gone off into it.”

In immigrating to New Zealand at 18, Alfyad Habib from Lebanon picked a place far away” and “arrived dreaming of snow, mulled wine, gingerbread men with lacy white icing and raisin buttons, carol singers and the sound of sleigh bells. When he disembarked at Auckland Airport, be didn’t immediately realise his mistake, because a cold shiver entered into him, and didn’t leave for several weeks.”

Tawhai does what only art with a capital A seems able to. As in Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Tawhai shows us desperation, abandonment, hopelessness. Yet through it all, there’s some quality that makes it worth it, some light or shine that changes everything. Even in heartbreak – or perhaps because of it – we’re enthralled.