Child Star, by Matt Thorne

How would you feel if the most intimate details of your adolescence were captured on television, and viewed by millions? What sort of adult would it make you? You could ask Michael Jackson. But since he's probably not doing many interviews now, your best bet would be to read Matt Thorne's breezy, absorbing novel.

Child Star is about a shy suburban boy whose emerging sense of self is fundamentally disrupted by his role in a TV series that dramatises his pubescence. An ingenuous, insidious hybrid of reality show and soap opera, All Right Now! frees sensitive yet average 13-year-old Gerald Wedmore from comprehensive-school purgatory and semi-detached domesticity. It casts him into a more vigorous world, populated by more vivid people – one of whom becomes the first love of his young life.

However, All Right Now! is not recommissioned (arguably the only truly implausible twist). Gerald is soon spat back out into a dreary monochrome netherworld with a vague sense that he's lost something important. As he tells the co-star he fell for, "I've felt hollow ever since it finished." Child Star tells you how he accidentally gets (a bit of) that something back.

Thorne's tender fantasy is too sophisticated for outright satire, and both novelist and narrator are too intelligent to score didactic points. Nevertheless, a suspicion pervades this entertaining, atmospheric book that the camera really can steal your soul. "You're going on television," says Gerald's ringmaster. "That makes you better than everyone else." Thorne quotes Liz Hurley's amusing (yet frightening) description of non-celebrities as civilians, and his astute cautionary tale describes all our vicarious lifestyles – watching celebs living the lives we crave, feeling we can never live ourselves unless we join them.

"Ever since I could remember, I'd imagined my life was continuously broadcast on a pretend TV station," confides Gerald. However, Child Star isn't only a book about the one-eyed god. Anyone who was happy at school or college, or just being young, will share Gerald's nagging feeling that adult life can often seem like a long epilogue. "Why is it so hard," wonders an older, wiser – and sadder – incarnation of Gerald's onscreen sweetheart, "just to live?'

Thorne is a bit of a child star himself. He's still only in his late twenties, yet this is already his fifth novel. He has also written for film and TV, and coupled with his chatty, confessional narration, the conversational dialogue conjures up an uncanny naturalism that the makers of All Right Now! could only dream of.

Thorne name-checks real showbiz autobiographies (from Geri Haliwell to Victoria Beckham), and TV series. "This isn't EastEnders," declares All Right Now's pompous, amoral dramaturge. "This is a realist drama with sympathetic characters."

Yet far from shattering your suspended disbelief, these journalistic flourishes draw you further in. The realistic surface of Thorne's fiction is a pleasure in itself, but its substance stays with you long after his everyday detail fades away.

"What's the point of living," asks Gerald, plaintively, "if no one knows what you're doing?" As Child Star illustrates with casual eloquence, fame is a new religion for people who no longer believe in God.