Walking Papers

First published by Viking Press in 1971, Hochman’s widely-praised novel is about a messy divorce told with a poet’s verve.

From the Viking Press edition: Diana Balooka: “Out of my womanhood is my madness woven.＂ And, for Diana, out of marriage has divorce arisen. With four children, a pet Zulu-Terrier (a rare breed), and a wheeler-dealer love affair to boot.

Diana Balooka: ＂We are babies. Watched by our elders. Like the dangerously Insane and deaf we invent our own language We gesture in our own mudras. We understand each other.＂ Breaking into herself, Diana is a sanity robber armed with cupfuls of tears and lots of laughs. How can pain be amusing?
Sandra Hochman’s novel is how.
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 stageprop farm, or to life In Paris with a hypnotist; hold, for a moment of tormented reflection, on Jason, the nonhusband; 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.
Miss Hochman pulls and tugs her heroine—a mother, tapdancer. 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 women to be read.