The land of opportunity

If my interviewee, Andrew O’Hagan, had personally arranged this little scenario, it could not have been more apt. For I am here to meet the Booker-nominated novelist, journalist, broadcaster and convivial member of London’s chattering classes to talk about his latest book and therefore to discuss what he calls “the murderous cult” of modern celebrity.

“What a gift!” exclaims the Scot when he arrives minutes after McCutcheon and her man leave. “When you are a celebrity again… How perfect is that?” murmurs O’Hagan, who is fast becoming the literary equivalent of a celebrity himself since he was recently named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.Firing up the first of a dozen Marlboro Lights, he looks fit and tanned (he’s just back from a working tour of India with Irvine Welsh) in dapper dark grey checks, aquamarine sweater and coral pink socks. He announces jubilantly that the drinks are on him. Shortly before he left the London home he shares with the writer India Knight and her two sons to meet me, he received a letter announcing that he has won the EM Forster award for outstanding achievement, which is in the gift of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

“You are the first person I’ve told,” says O’Hagan, who for the next couple of hours can’t quite wipe the pleased smile off his face, which is given to geniality anyway. The prize, worth 15,000, will be presented in May. Previous recipients for the annual international award include Seamus Heaney and Bruce Chatwin, so he’s in good company. The judges this year included Richard Ford and Don DeLillo, and O’Hagan will receive the award in New York a couple of weeks after completing a 10-city tour of the States, with Zadie Smith, to promote the work of young Brit-lit stars.

“There are good days and bad days for writers and this is definitely one of the good days, when you come out of your cupboard to find you’ve got this amazing honour,” he says, ordering our first round of drinks. “I hope you didn’t mind meeting me here,” O’Hagan asks politely as he gestures at our glamorous surroundings. “I just didn’t want to take a nice lady like yourself to some grotty dive as rough as a badger’s arse.”Nice manners and a nice turn of phrase. What more could a lady ask for?The venue is a matter for discussion because, as he notes, there are those who believe he ought to choose to be interviewed in the sort of London low-life pub where the Scotia Nostra congregate to whinge. But O’Hagan is impatient with inverted snobbery.

A cradle Catholic, he eloquently supported the composer James MacMillan’s comments a couple of years ago about rampant religious bigotry in Scotland, in an impassioned essay.When O’Hagan wrote another article attacking Scotland’s culture of “self-pity” last October, he was accused by the crime novelist Ian Rankin of “making a good living off being a bit chippy about modern Scotland. I would tend to give him more credence if he was living in Scotland rather than being one of the London literati”.“How small-minded can you get?” exclaims O’Hagan. “It’s cloth-eared rot! I may live in London, but I’m still connected very deeply to Scotland. A big part of my working day is devoted to enlarging the possibilities of Scotland as a modern society, but I’m not an aspect of the Scottish Tourist Board. I would like nothing more than to bagpipe away for the virtues of Scotland – if it was only perfection. But a healthy culture needs to have an honest, replenishing attitude to its own state of affairs.”

There is a historical blindness and imaginative small-mindedness in the country, he continues, that is “washed, dried and aired every day on programmes like Ruth Wishart’s [BBC Radio Scotland] show and others. They want to propel Scotland perpetually into the past and into a sense of grievance.“Well, I have to say that is not the Scotland I love. It’s not the Scotland of the mind that matters to me. I want a country with proper philosophical thinking and proper philosophical reach. I don’t want to live in a world of screaming fishwives, who do not want to accept that anybody has ever stepped across the Border and might actually continue to have a commitment to a whole-hearted idea of a progressive Scotland, which I certainly do.”Indeed, Personality, his second work of fiction and third book, is a quintessentially Scottish novel. Told in peerless prose by many voices, it is utterly compelling. It’s the story of three generations of women – mothers and daughters – and neatly bookends his acclaimed first novel, Our Fathers, about three generations of men, fathers and sons.

Personality centres on a 1970s child star, Maria Tambini, “a little girl with a big voice”, who grows up above the family chip shop in Rothesay. Maria wins Opportunity Knocks five times in a row. She stars at the London Palladium, sings for Ronald Reagan at the White House and duets with Liza Minnelli, while relentlessly starving herself to death.Although Personality is also about the lives of two other powerfully drawn women characters – Maria’s disappointed Scots-Italian mother, Rosa, who kills herself, and her immigrant mother, Lucia, who is burdened with a dark secret in her past – comparisons have inevitably been drawn with the tragic life story of the Scottish singer Lena Zavaroni.She grew up above the family chip shop in Rothesay, won Opportunity Knocks five times, starred at the Palladium, sang at the White House, and duetted with Frank Sinatra and Minnelli. Zavaroni’s mother also committed suicide. The singer died at the age of 35 in 1999, after undergoing controversial brain surgery to cure her of depression and the slimming disease anorexia nervosa.So O’Hagan, who is already fielding calls from newspapers, is poised for them to embark on one of their furious feeding frenzies, with wild allegations that he has “stolen” Zavaroni’s story. He hasn’t, of course, although he argues persuasively that no one owns the story of their life. “You don’t own your life story; I don’t own mine. Marilyn Monroe didn’t own hers, which is why Joyce Carol Oates was able to write her empathetic masterpiece, Blonde.”

Personality, which O’Hagan says is “absolutely a work of the imagination”, is as much inspired by other women’s stories – those of Diana, the Princess of Wales, Judy Garland and Karen Carpenter – as it is by Zavaroni’s.Nevertheless, O’Hagan believes Zavaroni was the last gasp of a world that existed before global corporate sponsorship and MTV. “The book is set at a moment when the innocence of Britain turns into a nightmare and people develop an appetite for disaster.”The journey through famousness for Zavaroni was a properly personal disaster that involved a notion of community and a post-war idea of domestic life, leisure and the good society, all of which he thinks are now irretrievably lost, particularly in Scotland.The 34-year-old vividly recalls sitting in his family’s living room in 1973, with his parents and his three brothers, watching the nine-year-old on Opportunity Knocks on their brand new television set. “I must have been five,” he says, rattling the ice in his gin and tonic.

His father, Gerald, encouraged the boys to clap when the Clapometer appeared to register the studio audience’s votes. “I believed him when he said if we clapped loud enough they would be able to hear us in London and we would help Lena Zavaroni win for another week; I clapped my hands to smithereens.” It’s one of O’Hagan’s formative memories, the sight of the egregious Hughie Green – who is also given a voice in Personality – introducing this phenomenally talented, tiny Scottish girl. “She was such a wonderful singer! There was something almost disembodied about her which, given her later problems, is ironic. I wasn’t aware of this at the time, of course, although I remember watching her with great attention. There was something mesmerising about the sound that could come of this little frame, the way that, like Judy Garland, she could occupy all these emotional songs about love and yearning and regret when she was still only a child.“Do you remember her inhabiting those words that must have been so mysterious to her? She climbed into the songs, she erupted into the chorus and would shrink into the verses, always using her arms and her eyes. There was also the fact that she came from Rothesay, a place that we visited. It marked the first time for us that somebody local became a celebrity, so it felt as though she was almost a possession of ours.”He says his whole family was struck by Zavaroni’s ability; then deeply moved by her later troubles.

His father recently told him a story, about his grandmother, Mary O’Hagan, that he didn’t know when he was writing the book. After she died in Glasgow in the 80s, his father went to her tenement flat to go through her things.“She didn’t have much,” says O’Hagan. “But in the back of her purse he found three photographs of Lena Zavaroni. She was always so encouraging of that little girl, as we all were. The jump that child took from a small Scottish island to world fame was fixating.”One of the most fascinating aspects of popular culture is the feeling that it describes your life, he adds, especially if you come from a city like Glasgow, “where people really measured out their lives in sugar spoons of it”.Born in a Glasgow tenement, O’Hagan is the youngest of four boys.

They moved out to Kilwinning in Irvine New Town and grew up in a new house. His mother, Nancy, a cleaner, held down four jobs; his father was a carpenter. Personality begins with the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. O’Hagan has total recall of that carnivalesque day. “I can scroll it in front of me like a newsreel. It’s a bittersweet memory, although it was ceaseless jollity, with all the bunting and games and jelly and ice-cream.”Bittersweet because his father, who was often more absent than not and who would move chaotically back and forth into the family’s lives, was not there. “I think it’s his absence that I remember more about that day than anything else,” says O’Hagan.

Despite the fact that he has said his parents “hated each other” and his father beat his mother, he refuses to indulge in soul-searching.Eloquent and thoughtful, he’s not a troubled, vexed character. “I’ve always been a convivial person. I like having a nice time – and I do! I’m not psychologically traumatised by my ‘Scottish working-class past’, although it’s a central, very lovable part of my life.”He grew up in a house where there were no books, so he read every book in the local library twice. “I even read the Mills & Boon!”At 13, he won a scholarship to study with Scottish Ballet, but turned it down – his macho father’s reaction to this achievement sounds like a scene from Billy Elliot. O’Hagan then became the first of his family to go to university, gaining starred first-class honours in English literature at Strathclyde.The day after he graduated he boarded a train for London, where he crashed out on a friend’s floor. He became editor of the St Dunstan’s Review, a newsletter for disabled ex-servicemen. He led a party of these sightless war veterans across the South Downs with the aid of a clothes pole; then got the sack for reading them the scene from King Lear in which Edgar leads the blind Gloucester to the edge of a cliff – an autobiographical memory he uses in Personality.

In 1991, he beat off 200 contenders to become deputy editor of the London Review of Books, a post he still holds.His first book, The Missing, a factual account of missing persons, murders and the history of his own Irish-Catholic family, grew out of an article he wrote for the LRB while covering the trial of the two boys accused of murdering James Bulger. The critics were rapturous. Blake Morrison wrote: “After The Missing, Britain doesn’t look the same place.” Follow that.O’Hagan did, with Our Fathers, a plangent, beautifully written novel that was nominated for the Booker. It is about the final months of the life of a Socialist dreamer who led Scotland’s building programme after the war. His grandson comes home to watch over his mentor and learns the story of his family and their search for Utopia. “I have scarcely read so silvery beautiful a style… nor one so tender about matters of life and death,” wrote Candia McWilliam.

That book was about men, but Personality is all about women. One of his starting points was the desire to examine the way generations of male writers have portrayed women in fiction. He wanted to look at that tradition of Victorian male writers who establish a heroine at the centre of a novel – Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Tess of the d’Urbervilles – then give her an inner life, torture her over many hundreds of pages, and finally murder her. “I wanted to take that wheel of expectation that the reader has and turn it so that the reader’s gaze also becomes involved in the celebrity culture.”Viewers and readers collude in that pernicious form of modern torture, he believes, which is why celebrity has become the central preoccupation of the young. “It’s an ever-present soap opera. There’s a malicious gleam in people’s eyes today. Their expectations of celebrities have become almost malign and there’s something murderous about our desire to see people fail, the slow descent towards implosion – the cancelled tours, the remaindered books.“It’s a degraded gladiatorial combat.

We are living in a voracious, vengeful entertainment zone. Celebrity is a mad contagion, so Billy Connolly and Lulu, for instance, can’t just write books about their wonderfully successful careers – they’ve also had to have had this terrible childhood.”He hopes, however, that readers of Personality, which is thrillingly multifaceted, will discover that the book honours Lena Zavaroni and her gift. “I’ve been in touch with her father, her sister, and her cousin during the three years I spent writing the book. I’ve also written to them warning them that the tabloids may try to whip this into a sensational story,” says O’Hagan, whose next novel is a self-help satire set in America. “Lena Zavaroni’s life was a difficult one and it must be increasingly difficult for her family to go on contemplating that, but I’ve tried to behave like a gentleman towards them.”I tell him that I think the novel is a profound tribute to Zavaroni’s memory, then I remember something the fragile little girl said when she was barely into her teens: “I feel as if I have given away my soul. I don’t have it any more, I am dead inside.”Perhaps her still grieving family may finally find her lost soul refracted through the redemptive power of O’Hagan’s fiction.

Personality is published by Faber on April 7 (16.99)