Lovesong is narrated by Ken, who is considering giving up writing. Indeed, he’s vague about whether he prefers to work imaginatively on real people, and not even sure what determines his approach. ‘‘I wrote it purely for my own pleasure,’’ he says. ‘‘My imagination,’’ he tells the reader, ‘‘such as it is, needs the facts to feedoff.’’ So the question for Alex Miller, who in earlier books such as Journey to the Stone Country (which won the Miles Franklin award in 2003) and Landscape of Farewell transformed stories of friends into fiction, is to what extent is that true of his own working method. But there’s a moment in Lovesong, which was last night named the 2010 Age Book of the Year, when the narrator, a novelist called Ken, confesses that he doesn’t really like making up stories. IT’S usually a bit dodgy to conflate the views of a writer with those of one of his characters.
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