The Atlantic Ocean: Reports from Britain and America
*Starred Review* O’Hagan confronts us with individuals coping with paradoxes characteristic of the 1990s through the present: beggars in states of perpetual hustle and standstill; Thai workers in Israel tending lilies bound for London; children torturing each other yet growing up to be law-abiding citizens; a Yeats student dying as a suicide bomber. His confrontation is not aggressive but a gentle, prodding invitation: a turning of the spotlight on the self as a participant in moments when “something was truly lost in all this human struggle for gain.” This phrase, about soldiers’ deaths, is emblematic of taking conflicting abstractions—tradition-globalization, independence-imprisonment, the natural–the man-made, evil-innocence, and appropriation-creation—and tracing unlikely intersections. His writing is so skillfully fact-packed that we sink into the stories, forgetting how much we are learning. O’Hagan laments “certain kinds of vanishing which will never attract much interest”; then he directs our interest to these very matters, earning a mantle he gives William Styron as one “who wished to taste the worst his century had to offer and yet to show compassion in the telling.” Stupendously unflinching, bursting with possibility. --Cynthia-Marie OBrien