Late in My Tango with Barbara Strozzi, Phil Ockerman, the main narrator, goes to Diamond Heart in Scotland, ‘a centre of dynamic calm in which mind and spirit gather energy for the next forward move’. He is the stand-in writer to teach a course on ‘The Search For Page One’. If Russell Hoban finds it difficult to get started on a novel then I suspect he refers back to something like this: Girl meets Boy; people may be drawn in more than one direction at once; they often have their own agendas: love is not simple. Will he/she, won’t he/she?
Characters from other books wander in to say hello; images recur. Phil reminds us that we were introduced to Diamond Heart in Her Name Was Lola — ‘Bloomsbury, 2003’. Because Hoban’s books are so self-referential, we might almost think that the identities of the protagonists don’t matter.
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