The Atlantic Ocean

Starred review from August 6, 2012
Award-winning Scottish novelist O’Hagan (The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe) brings together pieces previously published in Granta, the Guardian Weekend, the London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. A brilliant essayist, he constructs sentences that pierce like pinpricks. He recalls the emotional confessions elicited by his first published essay, from 1993, about the killing of two-year-old James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys; the original essay (included here) segues into a chilling confession of his own boyhood bullying: “Torture among our kind was fairly commonplace.” After the July 7, 2005, London bus bombs he thinks, “In this seat, would it be a leg I’d lose, or an arm?” Sailing the ocean blue to write about Americans (such as Lee Harvey Oswald, William Styron, and James Baldwin), he dissects In Cold Blood and concludes: “It is clear now he invented whole sections.... None of it happened as Capote wished it had.” Eye-tracking O’Hagan’s observations on everything from Internet “mob tactics” and Marilyn Monroe (“Marilyn blew in like a snowdrift”) to 9/11, one finds bright flashes of critical insights and trenchant thoughts embedded in dark synaptic cobwebs of anguish, grief, and memory.

November 15, 2012
Assorted opinions on literary and cultural matters by critic and novelist O'Hagan (The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe, 2007, etc.). The best of these pieces are not about books, though most of the author's new collection is built on essays occasioned by them. One highlight is a searching piece that looks at the parallel lives and deaths of two soldiers in Iraq, an American Marine and a British guardsman who fell on the same day; both seem like Icarus dropping into the sea in Brueghel's famous painting, ignored by the plowmen--and feuding relatives--surrounding them. A piece on gardening opens on a slyly Proustian note: "For a long time, England used to go to bed early." That was, of course, before the English came over all postmodern and ironic about gardening, which O'Hagan sorts out nicely: "Scots get into trouble for not being flowery enough, although they are catching the bug; and the Welsh prefer vegetables." Other pieces are less fresh, especially the reviews disguised as essays. An examination of Lee Harvey Oswald yields only stagnant Mailer-isms; Mailer, who figures in the piece in question, could have handled that duty himself. And does anyone need still another piece on the cultural phenomenon that was the Beatles ("Even people who don't care about popular music...are conscious of how these English songwriters may have harnessed the properties of their own time")? A mixed bag with some very good lines (if often spoken by others) jumbled up with some rather stale ephemera.

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Starred review from December 1, 2012
O'Hagan confronts us with individuals coping with paradoxes characteristic of the 1990s through the present: beggars in states of perpetual hustle and standstill; Thai workers in Israel tending lilies bound for London; children torturing each other yet growing up to be law-abiding citizens; a Yeats student dying as a suicide bomber. His confrontation is not aggressive but a gentle, prodding invitation: a turning of the spotlight on the self as a participant in moments when something was truly lost in all this human struggle for gain. This phrase, about soldiers' deaths, is emblematic of taking conflicting abstractionstradition-globalization, independence-imprisonment, the naturalthe man-made, evil-innocence, and appropriation-creationand tracing unlikely intersections. His writing is so skillfully fact-packed that we sink into the stories, forgetting how much we are learning. O'Hagan laments certain kinds of vanishing which will never attract much interest; then he directs our interest to these very matters, earning a mantle he gives William Styron as one who wished to taste the worst his century had to offer and yet to show compassion in the telling. Stupendously unflinching, bursting with possibility.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)