He is a writer of stern and bleak ambition, but with a tender concern for the people who find themselves adrift and inadequate—for their particularity, for the singularity of their broken stories.
Authors Andrew O'Hagan
Hilary Mantel
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There are few writers currently at work who are so genuinely and unfashionably engaged with literature’s big, old questions—aesthetics, ethics, politics, religion, authenticity.
Claire Messud
Andrew O'Hagan’s opinions on others
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Many of DeLillo’s novels are propelled by an acute sense of communal dread—of crowds, of surveillance, of the desperate “creativity” of the terrorist, of an “airborne toxic event”—and long before living history affirmed a number of his paranoid presumptions, his novels were making the case for America as a place where nothing very much was reliably innocent or safe.
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DeLillo the novelist prepared us for September 11, but he did not prepare himself for how such an episode might, in the way of denouements, instantly fly beyond the reach of his own powers.
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The Corrections has an interesting relation to the Great American novel that it is claimed by some to be: it is a compendium of attempts, and its sentences are never entirely themselves, which might be a definition of literary Postmodernism.
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Franzen has that tendency common among younger American novelists to medicalise everything. A postman can’t walk up a path and, as it were, deliver a letter, without his actions being garlanded in super-conscious irony about the meaning of corporate gardens, the infernal consciousness of dogs, and wised-up statements about the general homeostasis of the postman,
Don DeLillo
Andrew O'Hagan
Falling Man
The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen
Be Near Me