I t’s hard to think of many superficial affinities between Frank O’Hara, the queer poet and art critic whose urbane voice is synonymous with 60s Manhattan, and Alexander Selkirk, the 18th-century Scottish privateer whose marooning on a tiny island in the South Pacific would eventually inspire Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Yet, curiously, it is a line from O’Hara’s poem Mayakovsky that Francesca de Tores refits for Selkirk’s mouth at the opening of her new novel, Cast Away. Selkirk insists that he is cast upon the island “only by the catastrophe of my personality” – “which is a sobering thing, even for a man used to being sober”.…