Frank Sargeson's Collected Stories are perhaps dangerously recommended if one calls them distinctive sketches of New Zealand life and character. But these extremely accomplished pieces, mostly very short and wry, one of them long and picaresque, are neither provincial nor exotic but simply human. They are mostly told as first-person narratives, and are adept at evoking character through voice and turn of phrase. Maoris and immigrants, farmers and layabouts, beaches and baches, betting and beer-drinking and trotting sheilas, going crook or feeling like a box of birds—the subjects and the language build up a whole way of life complete with beliefs and attitudes ('good cobbers' being better than 'good people'). The weaker stories tend to make their comments too explicit, but in the best of them, like "Toothache', 'Three Men', 'In the Department', 'A Man and his Wife', or 'The Hole that Jack Dug', the human relationships...