Scotland's saddest export

In the early 1990s, as the "new Scottish writers" were becoming a publishing phenomenon, the Irish novelist Colm Toibin did what only an Irish writer could do humorously, and asked why none of them were Catholics. With an older writer such as George Mackay Brown discounted as a mere convert, and Irvine Welsh still to register, Toibin wrote an essay describing his meeting with a former shipyard worker called Thomas Healy.

When Toibin asked him if he was Scotland's only Catholic novelist, Healy replied that the issue had never occurred to him. But Healy's novel, A Hurting Game, about boxing and failure, came with a lavish endorsement from Andrew O'Hagan, a young Scottish writer, to whom it had.

O'Hagan had established himself in London with a powerful species of literary journalism which culminated in The Missing, his extraordinary investigation into vanished lives. But by the time he had started work on his first novel, O'Hagan had more on his mind than writing Scottish fiction for an English audience; he also wanted to write Catholic fiction for a Scottish audience.

His two novels to date have achieved this synthesis nicely. Our Fathers, about three generations of west-of-Scotland Catholic men, overturned Toibin's image of a Protestant ascendancy in Scottish fiction and pushed O'Hagan on to a Booker Prize short list. And now, with Personality, O'Hagan has taken as his theme Scotland's Italian immigrant community.

His protagonist, Maria Zambini, is a fictionalised version of Italo-Scotland's saddest celebrity export, the child singer Lena Zavaroni, who died in 1999, having suffered from anorexia for her whole adult life.

It is not just his subject matter which lends O'Hagan's fiction its Catholic texture. There are stylistic traits in it, which run counter to the harsh language and baleful metaphysics characteristic of much of 1990s Scottish fiction.

Descriptions of Maria Tambini's background on the island of Bute are lavished by O'Hagan with a giddying mosaic of imagery, as if the things of the world are the incense and icons of feeling. The decorations and kiddies' sweets at a Silver Jubilee party, which sets the opening scene of the book, are like the flickering idols of childhood expectation.

The contents of a suitcase, once owned by the drowned lover of Maria's mother, are the tenderly preserved relics of a broken heart. Above all, the obsession with personality and with television celebrity, are, for Maria Tambini, the empty indulgences which promise a paradise of adoration but ultimately provide only loneliness and despair.

Personality is rich in its island background, lyrical with the sadnesses of Maria's Scottish-Italian family, abuzz with the sickly glamour of its 1970s and 80s television protagonists - abundant in all of its characters, in fact, except for one. Maria remains curiously featureless, as flat as a Byzantine Madonna. She comprises only two characteristics: her inexplicable talent, and her all-too-explicable anorexia.

For sure, the novel is consciously built on this vacancy. Maria didn't grow up, therefore she has no character; she isn't fleshed out, because she just gets thinner and thinner; like a saint, her image is worshipped or reviled while her interior life stays remote.

But O'Hagan does not quite pull off the gamble he has taken by fictionalising an emptiness as famous and forgettable and painful to contemplate as Lena Zavaroni's life.

This is not so much the risk of offending the living by conjuring with the dead. In most respects, the book is a beautifully written proof of the felicity which fiction can draw from actual events. The risk on which O'Hagan falters, is that the fiction may not be sufficient; that his reader might prefer to search for the meaning behind his text.

Was there really no more to that tiny woman than a talent and an illness? This was a question I found myself asking, in a typically Protestant way, not about Maria Tambini, but Lena Zavaroni.