If Jung were alive, he and Hoban would have become great buddies. Of all contemporary novelists, Hoban's the one most obsessed with the kind of quest for individuation that leads deep into myth.

In his last novel, Amaryllis Night and Day, the narrator has the notion that

everybody at birth is issued a little box of images, music, words É that will appear and reappear in varying combinations all through life.
One could apply this 'notion' to the Hoban novel. Someone should do a PhD on him and the way his novels seem to evolve, one out of the other, with the reappearance of St Eustace, Christ, Orpheus, animated toys, cliff edges and Psalm 137.

The main protagonist of The Bat Tattoo is Roswell Clark. At 47 Roswell is a lost, possibly damned soul. Early in the novel we learn that his father died in a suicidal car crash and that afterwards his body was used as a crash-test dummy. Later, Roswell is driving in the car crash that kills his wife. It's enough to make any young fellow turn to making animated crash dummies, isn't it?

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