ABSTRACT
Russelll Hoban writes from a strange area, and at every turn has had his reputation unintentionally diminished by two factors. First, his route has been unconventional: like Michel Tournier in France, he made his original impact on the world of fiction as an uncommonly successful writer of children’s books, a point which unjustly impeded his subsequent acceptance as a serious broad-ranging fictionist. The second, and more difficult, fact is that Hoban is an American, born in Pennsylvania in 1925, who has lived in Britain since 1969 and has, paradoxically and against all odds, become a specifically English novelist. The chapter discusses Hoban as a dramatic example of a novelist for whom character and plot are almost as secondary as they are for metafictionalists, but who uses radical experimcntalism and textual self-consciousness as tools to express both ideology and belief in a way that theorists must consider both old-fashioned and compromising.
