Walking Papers

by Sandra Hochman

For Diana Balooka, out of marriage has divorce arisen. With four children, a pet Zulu-Terrier (a rare breed), and a wheeler-dealer love affair to boot. Breaking into herself, Diana is a sanity robber armed with cupfuls of tears and lots of laughs. How can pain be amusing?

This is a madcap erotic journal of the very separate parts of one woman's life. It is played out with a great personal intensity, a kind of tape-recorded reality that stuns and amazes upon the sound of her own voice. Fast forward to Juarez. Mexico; reverse to her flamboyant grandfather's used stage-prop farm, or to life In Paris with a hypnotist; hold, for a moment of tormented reflection, on Jason, the non-husband; then slowly spin forward again, frantic and funny, turn, turn, to everything there is a season . . . . Should the tape chance to break. she bends and splices it together, twists it and sets it to reel on a little further.

Hochman pulls and tugs her heroine―a mother, tap-dancer. writer, and partner in an affair that stretches from an ocean beach to real estate on Seventy- second Street―as she is caught to a bizarre parade of men on the hunt in New York City. Her invention, sensuality, and poetic gifts lend to Walking Papers a totally original novelist's voice belonging, in Diana's words, to "a woman obsessed with essentials." A woman to be read.

Genres: Fiction

210 pages, Paperback

First published July 30, 1971

About the author

American poet, novelist, journalist and filmmaker. Hockman's first husband was concert violinist Ivry Gitlis, and in 1965 she married Harvey Leve, an international lawyer with whom she has one daughter and who she later divorced. Hochman took her undergraduate degree from Bennington College in 1957 and then studied at the Sorbonne. She has been poet-in-residence at Fordham University and City College of New York. She received the Yale Series of Younger Poets award for Manhattan Pastures (1963).

Reviews

[BLRBrazil · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a pathetic excuse for a book! I wasn't sure I'd be able to get through to the end, as I picked it up each night with no enthusiasm and put it down again frustrated and a bit annoyed that I was wasting my time in this way. There was one brief section, about her constantly interrupted efforts to do T'ai Chi Chuan, that was genuinely funny and well-written, but that merely emphasized what the rest of this book might have been but didn't even come close to.
The self-obsession of a JAP is both interesting and entertaining in the hands of Goldie Hawn, but not in Sandra Hochman's, I'm afraid. Despite being born with a silver spoon and leading a privileged existence, Diana just sees herself as a pathetic victim of all the bad choices she has made over the course of her life. The bed-wetting is a clue that we are dealing with a troubled individual, but as the story plays out (I can't really say 'progresses') we see that the disturbances are largely of her own creation and the 'victim' posture becomes tiring after a while.
Well I struggled to the end, and hopes were briefly raised by a nice bit about her dog, but it only lasted a couple of pages and then we were back to the same old "Haig treats me terribly, but I love him, but I need to leave him, oh poor me what shall I do?" It was pretty much the same with the 1st and 3rd hubbies too, and while the 2nd one died, by the end of the book any sense of tragedy has been replaced by 'he was lucky to get out when he did'.
She also refers to two different people as 'the best lovers in the world', though she tends to use more vulgar language to get those points across, and a great deal of the book sees her absorbed in that obsession. She is supposedly trying to simultaneously raise 4 children, but no attention whatsoever is given to that in the book - it's ALL about her!