O’Hagan, Andrew. Caledonian Road. McClelland & Stewart, Toronto. 2024. F;7/24.

I chose this from Book Marks, Lithub’s weekly recommendations. I find them, similarly to prize juries’ selections, nearly exclusively progressive in content which even though I see the point doesn’t pull out for me what I think of as worth reading. I can’t escape that this is just writing I like. But I believe there is something objective in creative work that attracts readers’ attention. Lately I haven’t been reviewing books I don’t like but wanted to try to steer anybody reading this away from this long novel. It’s packed with exiguous literary hooks that lead nowhere. Although it looked like it might be an escape from LBGTQ, translations, and misanthropy, and I did like another much less ambitious book by O’Hagan The Illuminations, trust me. This far more pretentious effort is just a mess.

Although there is a Cast of Characters that goes on for seven pages, pretending to introduce something of the stature of War and Peace, Tolstoy O’Hagan is not. The main protagonist here is Campbell Flynn, a successful fiftysomething respected academic art critic. Flynn grew up in a working-class family, has made a serious hero of himself in London society, and is married to a wonderful woman who almost rescues him from destroying himself. His best friend from Oxford is a very wealthy thief who ends up disgraced and then murdered in prison. Flynn is befriended by Milo, a student with serious computer skills who swindles him financially and emotionally. Other characters swirl around in about a dozen subplots and mostly wind up in trouble, sometimes fatal but at least catastrophic.

I found myself through all of this (there are 650 pages) reminded of an exhibit I saw once at the Art Institute of Chicago (you can scroll down to a photograph of this in my comments on another book). It’s just a pile of junk. This story is also a heap of fragments thrown together: old England, Russian money, twentysomething vacuousness, gay love, wokeness, internet hacking, organized crime, famous wine, famous art, a hundred London locations, politics and government, betrayal, designers, residential tenancy, hacking the dark web, poets, fashion models, celebrities, gang murder, inheritance, writers, human trafficking, journalists, psychotherapy, addiction, imprisonment, Covid epidemic, cuisine, etc etc. The shocking thing is that there is zero dramatic or aesthetic order or impact to nearly all of it.

Why did I keep reading? Probably all those little hooks seemed to trap me into hoping for some sort of gathering-together I imagined O’Hagan was still capable of. And like a really bad movie I just wanted to find out what was going to happen. Believe me it’s not worth the trouble. Examples of “hooks”:

Jake, it seemed, did a screwface when anything wasn’t about him. Angus was noticing: even conversations that weren’t about him had to confirm his thinking or elevate your view of him.

Quickly, the old man had tears in his eyes. ‘It’s funny being a parent,’ he said. ‘We never know how much of it is our fault.’

But even with trenchant putdowns and moments of insight like those Flynn answers his son’s question of what he wants in life with, “Well, it would be nice to be the thing observed, to be like the perfect painting, in other words.” And our great art academic, author, father, everyman, hope of the world (and of this eventually tedious book) ends up broke, humiliated, abandoned by lovely reasonable wife, drunk, addicted, and made a fool of by conniving smartass Milo (who along with Flynn’s wife Elizabeth and maybe his daughter Kenzie emerges as about the only character with his nose above the horror and slime).

I read a few reviews wondering what the pros thought of this story. Most seemed lukewarm. But one (I can’t find it online at the moment) said something like, “If O’Hagan wanted to give us a coming-of-age story, or a picaresque panoply of London life, or a multigenerational paradox, or a tragedy of greed and affluence, or a story about the emptiness of academic pretension, why didn’t he write one?”

Amen. It’s a failed mighty blockbuster novel, don’t touch it.

5.3/6.1