Janet Frame's favourite movie was L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) by Alain Resnais, written by one of her favourite novelists Alain Robbe-Grillet. She was a great fan of the work of the French 'Nouveau Roman' authors, including Nathalie Sarraute.
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Janet Frame met Nathalie Sarraute in New York in the late 1960s and spent a pleasant evening talking with her about "the problems of writing". In his biography of Frame, Michael King reports on the meeting, and on Frame's delight at being able to talk to a leading practitioner of the 'nouveau roman'. King notes that Frame had reached a similar conclusion to the French novelists, that "the traditional novel created an illusion of order and significance that was not matched by reality", but, bizarrely, he claims that Frame had reached a similar position "by instinct rather than argument"! Here King shows himself out of his depth when straying into literary criticism, and that he was infected with more than a touch of the patronising attitudes towards Frame disseminated in some quarters, by those who were unable to accept her erudition.
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