He reached the door and never paused, raising his boot and kicking hard against the woodwork, sending it flying open. If Small Faces, Gillies MacKinnon's movie of Glaswegian gang warfare, typifies O'Hagan's first two books, then Personality resonates with Little Voice.Maria Tambini is a Scottish-Italian girl with an enormous singing voice that propels her from rural Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, into a meteoric career of touring, television, chat shows and record deals. O'Hagan's careful descriptions of Maria's affectionate upbringing gradually reveal the vortex of family secrets and lies that pull her into an unanchored spin once she has left the island for the dizzying whirl of show business. Nothing in her career is within her control, except for her diet, which she promptly closes down, adding anorexia to the external pressures bombarding her.O'Hagan wanted these percolated resentments and clipped stories to sit patiently at the centre of Maria's consciousness, and grow. "I wanted to build a journey for Maria's consciousness," he explains "It becomes a very drastic one. She's a girl who is a bit of a mystery to herself and, like many anorexics, she was finding it very hard to put her finger on the cause of her self-destructive impulses."There is a mounting anticipation, as Maria's fame and crowded isolation increases, that something will go badly wrong; anorexia, we are reminded, is a potentially fatal disease. "She's somebody who's trying to resist an unnameable compulsion to disaster.
In that sense I would relate a modern girl like her to what we're familiar with from the 19th-century novel, where the tradition is for male writers to examine a girl with a certain kind of consciousness and a certain kind of social pressure, to give her that internal life, to torture her, and then to murder her. That is true of Emma Bovary, that is true of Anna Karenina, that is true of Tess of the D'Urbervilles and of many figures in Henry James It was a staple. Readers came to expect that, and what I wanted to do was to use that novel structure to turn the wheel slowly on the reader's expectations for this girl. That is really the subject of the book: what readers expect of a girl in trouble."Women were often spoken for in O'Hagan's background, and he places a similar restriction upon his heroine. Maria's own very faint voice – as distinct from her singing persona – is drowned by the public clamour for her success and, as Personality evolves, for report of her failings. O'Hagan is convinced of the fundamental malevolence of this lusting fandom. "Look at the tabloids now," he exclaims, "they are practically licking their lips every time they are able to hoist another celebrity onto the front page as a disastrous human being!" This does seem a mite disingenuous – if he is wanting to turn the screw on the reader's expectation of Maria's predicament, then surely he is really encouraging the reader to collude with the voyeuristic dissection of her life? He is that life's director, after all.O'Hagan would deny entrapment.
Rather, he is concerned to identify the larger depleting forces in society that feed such a clamour. This idea strongly recalls Jonathan Franzen's concerted explorations of privacy and aloneness in defiance of the public glare. "The thing I like about Franzen most," O'Hagan agrees with a certain fellow-feeling, "is the sense of domestic alienation – the rituals of social interaction that are entirely isolating." Franzen's description of privacy as "the Cheshire Cat of values: not much substance, but a very winning smile" exactly places Maria's desperate isolation. She will perform even to her own mother because others' encroachments have eroded all space for her own personality.This public rapacity is dangerous. Late in the novel, Maria encounters a painting of a Berlin hunger artist in the Thirties, a starving girl caged in a restaurant full of bourgeoisie chomping away.
