Once upon a time I read every kind of rock fiction I could find.  Most of them claimed to be the real life of more or less thinly disguised real stars.  At the trashiest end this meant breezy accounts of bad behaviour by journalists who presumably couldn’t publish their originally planned biographies for libel reasons (see, for example, Elaine Jesmer’s Number One With A Bullet).  Other books were by musicians themselves, reflecting on their own experience of stardom (usually at one remove), turning it into fiction.  (See, for good examples of this genre, Bruce Thomas’s The Big Wheel , Stuart David’s The Peacock Manifesto, some of the stories in Steve Earle’s Doghouse Roses, and Peter Guralnick’s Nighthawk Blues—though Guaralnick is writing from managerial rather than musical experience).  And then there are writers who imagined incidents in star lives as a way of doing culture criticism (as in Alice Walker’s Elvis Presley story, ‘Nineteen Fifty-Five’ or Geoff Dyer’s wonderful jazz story-essays, But Beautiful).

My judgement then, and I don’t think anything has been published in the last few years to change it, was that, in the end, most fictional pop/rock lives were written by journalists, critics, or fans more interested in musicians than literature.  They were not written by novelists interested in musical lives as a way of exploring their writerly concerns [1]. Most of the rock/pop novels on my shelves, in short, are more interesting as romans a clefs than as romans.

Andrew O’Hagan’s novel about Lena Zavaroni, Personality, is, therefore, striking, to begin with, for being written by a literary name with no special interest in music [2]. O’Hagan has worked as a film critic; he has not, as far as I know, written previously about pop stars.  Zavaroni’s life interests him not because he was a fan but for the way it resonates with his own concerns as a writer.  The book that made his reputation, Missing, was a remarkable piece of non-fiction, combining autobiography, social history, reportage and social theory.  It developed from O’Hagan’s response to James Bulger’s murder into a much wider meditation about the ways in which people go missing, missing not just from everyday family lives but also from fictional and non-fictional accounts of those lives.  It’s as if twentieth century social and personal histories alike have holes in them that people never talk about.  Personality is in part, then, a novel about Zavaroni as a missing person [3].

O’Hagan’s second book, the equally remarkable, Our Fathers, is a novel about Scotland’s post-war history, about class and place and family and the way in which the corruption of ideals by time and need must also be understood as a brave refusal not to make do.  Again one can see why O’Hagan is drawn to Zavaroni’s story and what it can tell us about the changes in Scottish working class culture, Scottish working class identity, that have happened in his lifetime, to himself.  Lena Zavaroni, after all, was only a few years older than O’Hagan himself (and he too went to London, became, in his own way, famous).

Lena Zavaroni’s life story is, by now, well known.   She was born on November 4, 1963 in Bute to second generation Italian-Scottish parents and began performing publicly at the age of six.  She left Scotland to take part in (and repeatedly win) the ITV show, Opportunity Knocks, in late 1973.  She quickly acquired a manager, Dorothy Solomon, and signed a recording contract.  Her first record, a version of ‘Ma He’s Making Eyes At Me’, was a top ten hit in 1974 (her next release was ‘Personality’).  She became an established TV entertainer, headlined the London Palladium, and found international success while also attending the Italia Conti stage school.  She was also, as the biographies put it, ‘blighted by anorexia nervosa’ from the moment her career got going in London.   She was, in effect, semi-retired by the 1980s, in and out of hospitals and come-back appearances, and of more interest to the media as a freak than as a singer.  She died ‘of natural causes’ following a leucotomy operation (which she had demanded) on October 1, 1999.  She was not quite 36 years old.

Personality sticks to this narrative quite closely[4]. [4]O’Hagan’s heroine, Maria Tambini, is introduced to us shortly before she is due to appear on Opportunity Knocks.  She is living in Rothesay (on the Isle of Bute); her mother runs a fish and chip shop; her best friend, Kalpana, is Indian Scottish, the daughter of the local GP.   Maria is placed in two cultures—she’s Scottish-Italian growing up in a working class holiday resort—that seem already anachronistic.  From the opening of his story O’Hagan suggests the oddness of someone of Lena/Maria’s age embarking on a career in light entertainment at the moment of punk.  Maria’s last local performance is a part of Rothesay’s Silver Jubilee celebrations.

Thereafter Tambini’s career follows the same trajectory as Zavaroni’s.  First the rise: winning Opportunity Knocks week after week; non-stop guest appearances on TV and holiday and Xmas variety shows, first as a novelty then as a matter of routine; success in America.  Then the fall: illness, clinics, anorexia, headlines, silence, comebacks, disintegration.  But O’Hagan is less interested in the details of this story than in its shape, its destiny.  His account of Maria Tambini’s life is deliberately fragmented, a series of incidents presented using a variety of literary devices, viewed from a multitude of perspectives, narrated by many different voices (not least Hughie Green’s).

O’Hagan is a clever writer and one of the pleasures of his book is the way it plays off the moral clichés of the showbiz story against the novelist’s need for dramatic irony and deep structure.  Personality has the staples of a star life: the discarded family and childhood friend; the sinisterly controlling agent/manager; the obsessive fan; the lover who just wants to understand.  But these familiar figures are made to serve sophisticated fictional purposes.  The Tambini family history contains a mystery and its revelation gives us clues to the mystery of Maria herself.  The obsessive fan becomes a stalker, gives an external suspense and resolution to Maria’s life.  Maria’s lover, Michael, who has the nurturing masculinity of the hero of a love song, is also clearly a stand-in for O’Hagan himself, the interloper from another kind of culture.

O’Hagan is equally adept at using self-consciously literary devices.  Maria loses touch with Kalpana in a series of letters, in which her style changes from the personal to the impersonal, replying eventually with beauty tips, in the kind of form letter to which stars put their names in teenage magazines.  What O’Hagan describes here with elegant economy is not just “the evolution of distance” (his chapter title), not just Maria’s growing concern for make-up and appearance, but also the irony that while, in Bute, Kalpana is growing up, in the international world of showbiz, Maria is frozen in her role of child performer.  Michael, similarly, is given a job with a charity for the war blinded, for people who don’t know or care what Maria looks like.

Personality is a book about pop stardom.  It is not a book about pop music, and O’Hagan is at his least convincing when describing Maria as a singer[5]. [5]   He is obviously interested in the narrative of fame but his real fascination is, indeed, personality, personality as a kind of low cultural parable of creation, the star as a fiction, lifeless when the author withdraws.  Who creates a personality? Who or what lies behind it?  Personality is worth reading not because O’Hagan, as a good novelist, illuminates a real musical life, imaginatively turns a public story into a private one, but because he uses a pop story to illuminate the experience of writing fictions, turning the private into the public.

NOTES