They were books that set “I should ” against “I’m wishing ” and showed clearly that neither came without a cost.
It’s thus stumbling, joyous and rather worrying that his new book, in a classic critic-confounding way, should be anarchic, OTT, cheeky and gleeful. There’s an elegiac undercurrent, but one that only serves to make the stun and pleasure all of the more spicy. O’Hagan had learned one of the essential guidelines of the novel : if you are going to break a rule, you may as well splinter it.
So his new novel is articulated by a dog. Not just any dog, but Marilyn Monroe’s Maltese terrier Maf ( short for Mafia ), who was given to her by Frank Sinatra, who acquired him from Natalie Wood’s mummy, who bought him from Virginia Woolf’s sister, and who was born in the Highlands and spent his earliest years imbibing Trotskyist politics and the books of Henry Fielding. And dogs, naturally, are virtually telepathically linked with the history of the universe through dog eyes, from Plutarch to Freud thru Descartes ; they do not like pussies due to their pretensions to verse ; and have an insatiable gusto for digression. Maf also disdains the human schizophrenia between fantasy and fact. O’Hagan seems to have reset his internal novelistic barometer, departing from Flaubert and James and back to Cervantes and Sterne. He signals this himself, since Maf knows, as Maf would know, that one of Cervantes’s Exemplary Stories was narrated by dogs.
It is a novel with footnotes, lists, break-out songs, poetry, shameful name-dropping and an essayist’s eclectic range : O’Hagan, through Maf, gives a tour of animals in literature that others may have used for a doctoral postulation. Shattering a rule isn’t enough, though, unless one suggests an alternative classy.
O’Hagan makes Maf an incarnation of the picaresque.
He’s a devious chancer, a limitless optimist, a guffawing thinker. In the course of the novel he bumps into Cantinflas and JF Kennedy, Roddy McDowall and Ella Fitzgerald. He strays into conversations by cultural critics like Susan Sontag and Lionel Trilling in addition to attending Marilyn at acting classes and art studios. These encounters permit O’Hagan to let Maf off his leash, as it were, and eavesdrop on the type of novel we are reading. There is a telling exchange about the paintings of Roy Lichtenstein where the dealer claims : “Laughter and color are the sole answers to modern life… Cartoon objects. Cartoon characters. Cartoon meanings. Lightness is the new profundity…
Wow is the new Why. ” Later Maf criticizes Lee Strasberg’s “method acting ” college with the yap : “if it is not bleeding from the eyes and tripping downstage carrying a giant egg-timer you suspect it’s got to be frivolous. ” in the major literary party, where Maf disgraces himself by biting notables with dumb ideas, we can overhear Susan Sontag developing her notion of camp, with Maf as the puppish, inspiring Puck. And it’s Sontag’s notion of camp that anchors this sad-clever, arch-naive novel. As she wrote : “Camp suggests a comic vision of the planet. Although not a sour or polemical comedy.
If crisis is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment. ” Maf, as literal and metaphoric outside bet, is underinvolvement par excellence. For all his understanding of the past, Maf has no understanding of the future. The reader knows that Monroe will never act in a version of Dostoyevsky’s The Bros Karamazov, but Maf continues with his all-or-nothing support of her unachievable ideals. Edwin Morgan, in his poem the demise of Marilyn Monroe, asked : “does the slow white hearse of the kid of America follow you around? ” O’Hagan appears to expand on that line, riffing a complete Greyfriars Bobby to that cortege. If I were to say this novel was deeply shallow, I wouldn’t desire that to be a feedback. It has the demanding delicacy of a pond-skater standing on water, or a drink of poo topped up to the edge. That extraordinarily precision gives the novel its obstinate shade of disgruntlement : in a major way, it’s the 1st novel of the Obama age, full of potential and hope and haunted by grief and regret. On the second page, Maf describes his love of liver “it is a zizz and a yarm and a rumph and a treat ” which would completely apply to the novel if he added a hint of sours and a smear of tears. O’Hagan might, on the power of this, be the individual to wreck the Booker’s fear of funny.