Personality

The Diva in the Middle

Little Maria Tambini has a big, big voice. Personality, the third book from British novelist Andrew O'Hagan, tells the story of her talent as it propels her from the Isle of Bute, Scotland, where her Italian immigrant family runs a chip shop, to London, and on to international stardom. The arc is familiar: fame, narcissism, anorexia, exhaustion (that last one was what Mariah Carey had, right?). Personality reads like a scrapbook; we get to know the singer at a distance, from newspaper clippings, transcriptions of talk-show interviews, and through the eyes of her grandmother as she watches TV. The language is lovely, particularly in the sections narrated by Maria's friends and family on Bute. These passages are elegiac, sepia-toned, in Scottish cadence, adorned with memories of Italian tenors and eras gone by.

But there's something hollow at the book's center. Maria's character seems only half imagined: We aren't given her grandness as a performer, or what sort of girl she was before she stepped into the spotlight at thirteen. (This transition is told, somewhat ineffectively, in a series of letters between the nascent star and the girlhood friend she left behind.) I suspect that O'Hagan is alluding to the lack of self that Maria is left with after she has given everything to her public and starved herself nearly to death, but this feels like a cheat. Not to mention that there is nothing so dull as an eating disorder. What O'Hagan does imagine, with gusto, is Maria's audience: her mother (Maria's first fan), the Fish 'n' Chips philosophers outside the shop, her agent, and two men, one of which will become her lover, the other her stalker. This ornate panorama of the little people and their little, private moments gives Personality its generous heart. It is a book less about an individual than the hopes and dreams that the public allows a personality to stand for. As Hughie Green, the host of the star search program where Maria gets her start, says, "Talent is the heart's bid for freedom...Talent is the fight against silence." Maria, whoever she is, gives the members of the audience a reason to speak and reveal their secrets.

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