MAGICAL REVIEW: Unlikely Source

Our man Devin McKinney gets high praise for MAGIC CIRCLES from novelist Andrew O'Hagan in the NYRB:

The Beatles are the super-boomers' house band. Even people who don't care about popular music—especially those, one might argue—are conscious of how these English songwriters may have harnessed the properties of their own time, or were harnessed by them, down to every teenage sob and every kink of modern marketing. McKinney crunches the facts and pulps the possibilities before tossing everything into a great metaphysical soup, and his book carries sentences not unlike those Norman Mailer used to write forty years ago in the Village Voice:

Despite feeling paralysed at the center of the mania, the Beatles would draw their audience in by pushing it to new places. They would speak contentious, unprecedented words; offer upsetting, incomprehensible images of themselves; make disorienting musical noises. Just as their music would be the best and most challenging they had yet made, their collective persona would be more provocative, richer in dimensions than ambition or circumstance had previously allowed—or required. They would answer and interpret their suddenly hostile world in the language of symbol, the logic of dreaming; and they would, by accident and intent, seduction and aggression, tumult and meditation, sound early shots in the ferocious battle over consciousness which consumed the latter half of their decade.