A star who’s larger than life but empty inside

Whenever I’m in a supermarket checkout line and see a magazine boasting stories on the season’s “hottest new stars” or the year’s 20, 50 or 100 “most fascinating personalities,” I always feel certain that few, if any, of these fascinators would prove to be even mildly interesting if one actually got to know them. Often, it seems, there is an inverse proportion between what the media may register as “personality” and real-life personhood. Perhaps this is because it’s easier to market vacuity than substance. And even when a media “personality” may also happen to be a genuinely interesting individual, the very process of turning that fascinating private person into an instantly recognizable “personality” tends to drain something out of the original.

This paradox is a central theme of Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan’s novel “Personality,” the story of a little girl with a big voice whose talent as a singer catapults her to stardom at the tender age of 13. Maria Tambini is the daughter of an Italian immigrant family living on the out-of-the-way Scottish island of Bute. Even as a child, her tremendous gift is obvious to all who’ve seen and heard her perform in local venues. At 13 she gets her big break, appearing on a national television show called “Opportunity Knocks,” where she wins the talent contest an unprecedented seven times in a row.

Almost overnight, Maria is living in London under the hospitable roof and attentive eye of her agent-manager, Marion Gaskell. And indeed, even though she has never lived in a big city before, or hobnobbed with stars like Liberace and Dean Martin, or adhered to a grueling schedule of lessons, dance classes, concerts, recording sessions, interviews and TV and mall appearances, Maria seems to take to it all in stride. She is in no way intimidated by her new surroundings, nor does she become so overconfident and arrogant as to shun the professional guidance of her mentors. As her agent is proud to say, Maria’s a pro. And as Michael Aigas, one of her childhood friends from Bute, aptly puts it: “She’s just a nice girl, but there’s something amazing about her.”

What is amazing about Maria is in fact quite simple: She has a great voice and an even greater ability to give herself up to the song she is singing. O’Hagan depicts what makes her performances so absorbing: “Everyone disappeared as the music started. All the eyes out there were becoming one eye -- one great eye and a single beam of light -- and the sound she could hear was the sound of her own thoughts in time with the band as it opened up the verse.... Nobody ever heard a little girl sing like that before. The sound came from somewhere else. She gripped the microphone and swayed into every note; she bent her knees and clambered up for the feeling in the words.... She couldn’t be without the song.”

Offstage, Maria is, well, a trifle vacuous. Certainly, show-biz life, with its focus on performance and appearance, is hardly the most enriching milieu for an adolescent. But as O’Hagan also suggests, there has always been something rather shallow about Maria, even before she became a star.

Not surprisingly, under the pressures of her new life, Maria develops anorexia. And as if it were not bad enough being threatened from within, Maria is also in danger from a deranged fan. The only ray of hope in the poor girl’s life arrives in the form of her childhood acquaintance Michael, now grown into an intelligent, sensible and caring young man, who may nonetheless be getting in over his head.

There’s a certain hollowness at the core of “Personality”: It tells us little about show biz, stardom, pop culture and eating disorders that we don’t already know. But the writing is skillful, and the sense of milieu and mood is acutely conveyed. O’Hagan constructs his novel as a kind of sound chamber, using a variety of voices and viewpoints to lend context and texture to what otherwise might seem a somewhat thin and cliche-riddled story. We hear from members of Maria’s immigrant family, but though O’Hagan may have intended the details of Maria’s background to add a greater sense of depth, background and foreground never quite mesh in a convincing way.

More successful is his use of voices from the world of show biz, like TV host Hughie Green, a self-appointed priest at the altar of Talent. We also get to listen in on a correspondence between Maria and her childhood friend Kalpana Jagannadham, the daughter of a thoughtful Indian immigrant doctor who sets his child the example of being genuinely interested in the world around him. The contrast between Kalpana’s sympathetic intelligence and Maria’s increasing self-absorption and emptiness is tellingly drawn. Most dramatically, we also hear from two men who, in their vastly different ways, are in love with Maria: Michael, who hopes to save her, and Kevin Goss, an obsessed fan who writes her missives that are alternately adoring and menacing.

O’Hagan’s portrait of the relationship between Maria and Michael is what ultimately brings this novel to life. Here, at last, he takes us beneath surface appearances into the elusive inner world of two people who come to see each other as they really are.