The fame game is out to destroy genuine talent

Profiles of Zadie Smith ignore her fiction in favour of wet-lipped speculation about her life

More and more, it seems, we are thinking and talking and writing about fame – talent (or lack of it) and fame, suffering and fame, deserved or undeserved fame. Celebrity – now only second to "I" as the word most frequently deployed by columnists – is the biggest, hottest game in town.

It is probably bad for us all, both exhibitionists and voyeurs, this build-'em-up, knock-'em-down business orchestrated by PR agents and the media. But it can also be quite diverting to watch and provides a good living for iffy soap stars, ex-politicians, mouthy pundits and other harmless, marginal figures of our culture.

However, the fame game makes its own rules, the most significant of which is that those who play it have no choice as to when they drop out. Once you have stepped into the magic circle, however innocently and diffidently, you surrender a part of yourself. If you happen, say, to be a young, attractive and female novelist, it turns out that the parodic, imitation version of you that will be presented to the world presents sharp and particular problems.

The babe novelist is something of a contemporary phenomenon. Over the past 30 or 40 years, a number of female writers have found early success, from Françoise Sagan to Jeanette Winterson, but, because serious fiction was deemed to be of interest mainly to swots and eggheads, they were allowed to get on with their lives.

Now, extraordinarily, it has become groovy for a young person to write a novel; book publishing has become part of showbiz. When the books of JK Rowling became internationally successful, her money, looks and publicisable background propelled her into the ranks of the super-celebs. She became possibly the first writer in history to be stalked by paparazzi as she bought underwear or wore a bikini on a foreign beach.

She did her best to resist the process of celebrification, trying to guard her privacy, talking rarely to the press, avoiding public functions, but soon discovered the fame game's own catch-22. The act of avoiding publicity feeds another myth. Rowling was rumoured to be "reclusive", "arrogant" and – she hadn't written a book for at least a year – "suffering from writer's block".

The American novelist Donna Tartt, who became famous when her extraordinary first novel The Secret History was published, has paid an even higher price for her wilful decision to write in privacy rather than appear at parties or chat shows. The fact that she disappeared from public view and has worked for several years on a second novel – done what a serious novelist should do, in other words – has led to her being portrayed as weird and angst-ridden.

This month Zadie Smith is the target of the moment. Profiles have appeared in most of the newspapers, many of them ignoring her fiction in favour of wet-lipped speculation over her personality and private life. One scruffy piece made reference to her "bizarre relationships" and commented (libellously, one might think) that "boyfriends came and went, leaving her appetites largely unsatisfied".

Another equally loathsome piece, baldly headlined "Zadie Smith's most creative fiction is the story of her own deprived childhood", appeared in a national Sunday newspaper. Smith was presented as a brilliant, beautiful child of the streets, whereas, in fact, she has a solidly middle-class background. "Like those other tempestuous black British icons Naomi Campbell and Linford Christie," the article continued, "Ms Smith seems to have adopted boorishness, tantrums and withering disdain for others as a lifestyle." With its combination of smear, unattributed quotes, gossip, snobbery and racism, the article could easily be dismissed as a classic of an unpleasant form of English gutter journalism but, in its unpleasant way, it is interesting.

Since her successful first novel, Smith has by all accounts behaved in a sensible, grown-up manner. She has done the interviews without becoming egotistical. She has helped other writers, editing an anthology. Above all, she has managed to write a second novel which, according to early reports, is rather good.

But none of that is enough because writing and celebrity do not go together. Journalists and those who commission them have an implacable dislike of writers who not only write more seriously than they do but get paid better for their work and, if that novelist happens to be good-looking, self-confident and, worst of all, a young woman, the desire to undermine or destroy her talent seems to become irresistible.

So Zadie Smith is off to spend some time at Harvard. It seems like a good idea. The last young, attractive female writer from a racial minority to be given this kind of treatment by the British press was Arundhati Roy who not only went abroad but announced that she would probably not be writing any more fiction. Zadie Smith, one hopes, will not be following her example.