Thin Skin Emma Forrest Bloomsbury, 210pp, £6.99 ISBN 0747557357

Still only 25, Emma Forrest has almost ten years of experience in journalism. She has interviewed nearly everyone who counts in Hollywood and the British and American worlds of rock, making her ideally placed to write the kind of pop-culture fiction that my generation loves to read. Her first novel, Namedropper (1998), was rough round the edges, but still managed to be the best fictionalised account of the rise and fall of Britpop. Her interviews, inspired by Truman Capote, can be read as short stories about the state of modern celebrity. She doesn't just ask Brad Pitt or Benicio Del Toro about their love life, she goes with them to Tower Records and tells them what records to buy. Part of the charm of all her writing is the way she creates a sense of ineffable sadness, as (like many important authors before her) she attempts to see beyond the fairy dust of celebrity. Her articles often end with a retreat to the Chateau Marmont in LA (where much of this second novel was written) after another A-lister has let her down.

The heroine of Thin Skin, her second novel, is a star called Ruby, who appears in films with titles such as Mean People Suck and leads a life that shares significant parallels with Forrest's own. At first, it seems as if Forrest and her usual subjects have merged, creating a powerful sense of isolation. But she is too good to stop at disguised autobiography, and surrounds Ruby's first-person narrative with mainly unfavourable observations of the people she encounters as she moves from film set to doughnut shop to hotel. We are party to the thoughts of her agent ("Ruby is the worst client I've ever had"); boys she's involved with; and, at one point, a woman who lost her husband to Ruby takes over the narration.

Although this is a novel about solipsism, which is always dangerous territory, it is never solipsistic. Forrest's prose is fresh and there are some truly outrageous similes (my favourite: "He rethought his words, upgrading them like a steward at the Virgin Atlantic check-in desk"). Ruby describes her bulimia, self-scarification and bloodline necklaces. Forrest acknowledges that this condition is not something that her character can escape, but also allows the reader to feel both sympathy and a grateful distance.

The book has an epigraph from the troubled Guns N' Roses frontman, Axl Rose: "I realise I make exactly the same scream whether a great white is attacking me or there's a piece of seaweed brushing my leg." This, along with the title, reveals the area of sensitivity that Forrest is exploring. Making us care about the troubled life of a pampered individual is a difficult trick, and Forrest achieves this not by aiming for the universal, but by making Ruby's life truly horrible, and yet still slightly enviable. A particularly disturbing scene has Ruby covering her face in chocolate to make herself look ugly and unlovable, and food, sex, bulimia, blow jobs and self-induced vomiting often come together in graphic scenes.

There is only one chapter that doesn't seem to work: a diatribe on how Ruby liked Russell Crowe before anyone else, which reads more like Forrest's opinion than Ruby's. Apart from that, Thin Skin makes elevating reading out of dark material.

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