Frank Sargeson's third volume of memoirs [Never Enough!] is subtitled 'Places and People Mainly'—but the choice is in no way random. Looking back over more than 70 years, he wants us to understand his life, see the justification of it. At the centre, as he describes it, there is a paradox—that he was never likely to become the sort of writer who would be much read by the New Zealanders he most liked….

A romantic feeling for the land, and for people who work it, which he, better than other New Zealand writers, got into his fiction, appears in this book as something existing in a compartment. The never-realised dream of living in some sort of rural co-operative would perhaps have been a reconciliation of the two sorts of living—the natural and the intellectual….

In his life as a writer, he never gave up hope that...