He’s Got Voice, Looks and Fans. And He’s 11.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/books/the-love-song-of-jonny-valentine-by-teddy-wayne.html

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“An old soul is the last thing you would expect to find inside Justin Bieber,” an old entry on his Web site says. “But all it takes is one listen to the 15-year-old soul-singing phenomenon to realize that he is light years ahead of his manufactured pop peers.” Mr. Bieber, now 18 and as big a pop star as ever, is the model for the 11-year-old with an old soul in Teddy Wayne’s sad-funny, sometimes cutting new novel, “The Love Song of Jonny Valentine.”

Jonny can seem so much like a young Justin clone that you’d think that Mr. Bieber could sue for copyright infringement. Like the real phenom, Jonny became a tween idol at an absurdly early age: in two years, he has metamorphosed from an ordinary schoolboy into a global heartthrob. He’s almost as famous for his cutesy-pie hair as for his soulful voice, and he plays to arenas of screaming girls, one of whom he routinely invites onstage for a tearfully happy serenade. A highlight of his act is a song delivered from a cheesy, dangerous-looking heart-shaped swing that swoops out over the audience.

Mr. Wayne does deviate, occasionally, from the Bieber story line: he makes Jonny’s mother his manager, and his father a missing presence in his life, and has Jonny growing up in St. Louis, not Canada. Yet, for whatever reason, his novel oddly echoes the 2011 authorized documentary “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never.” It too features a filmed visit home to memorialize the star’s humble roots, and chronicles the grueling work involved in a tour (including a brush with a performance-threatening illness) that will culminate in a blowout show in Madison Square Garden.

Mr. Bieber comes across in that movie — and in reams and reams of interviews — as a nice, smart, conscientious and highly groomed young man, who spends a lot of time trying to meet everyone’s expectations, thinks about the long-term arc of his career and, in the words of one of his handlers, occasionally gets “a little whiny” about not having a normal life. The same is true of Mr. Wayne’s narrator, who readily captures the reader’s sympathy while conveying the weird isolation and stress that come with pop stardom today.

As he did in his critically acclaimed debut novel, “Kapitoil” — set in 1999 and told from the point of view of a young computer programmer from Qatar who gets a job on Wall Street — Mr. Wayne seems intent on satirizing the absurdities of late-stage capitalism. In this case he sends up America’s obsession with celebrity and the insatiable, implacable fame machine that eats up artists and dreams, lacquers the talented and untalented alike with glitz, and spits out merchandise and publicity in a never-ending cycle of commodification.

Though Mr. Wayne is sometimes only shooting goldfish in a gilded bowl, he does manage to capture the mania of the media and besotted fans, the grinding weariness of a long tour and the cold-eyed strategizing of executives.

Jonny and his business-savvy mother, Jane, meet with two honchos from the record label, who give them a report titled “Jonny Valentine 2.0 Brand-Extension Strategy” and suggest setting him up on a date with a girl from their “stable” named Lisa Pinto, who could help him expand his reach in the Latino market. Jane is constantly nagging Jonny about his weight and trying to control what he eats — the plan is to keep him “slim and boyish” as long as possible — and exhorting him to work harder, never mind his exhaustion.

“The top person is never simply the most talented, or the smartest, or the best-looking,” she tells him. “They sacrifice anything in their lives that might hold them back.”

Mr. Wayne never lets the reader forget the huge pressures and responsibilities placed on Jonny’s slender shoulders — like all the jobs that would be lost if he were to give up show business — and he makes us sympathize with Jonny’s conflicting desires to please his mother and his business representatives, and his own longing for something resembling an ordinary life.

Jonny frequently vomits before going onstage, and starts sneaking his mother’s zolpidem to get to sleep. He also cruises the Internet, seeking clues to his missing father’s identity while musing that his dad wouldn’t approve of the “celeb lifestyle” he and his mother are leading.

No doubt Mr. Wayne has made Jonny even younger than Mr. Bieber (who was 16 when he played his first headlining show in Madison Square Garden) as a way of mocking contemporary pop culture’s obsession with youth, but it’s a decision that can lead to problems with the book’s narration.

Much the way the hyper-articulate John Updike struggled at times to channel his very literary observations and musings through the point of view of Rabbit Angstrom — an ordinary small-town Toyota salesman — so Mr. Wayne sometimes struggles to depict the thinking of his 11-year-old hero, a precocious and knowing kid, but an 11-year-old nonetheless.

While Jonny’s sophisticated understanding of music is plausible enough — he is, after all, a genuine prodigy — it’s harder to believe that he would talk about “the vicious cycle of marketing budgets” or Michael Jackson’s achieving “a deeper level of cultural penetration” than he has yet to reach.

What makes Mr. Wayne’s portraits of Jonny, his mother and the tour staff so persuasive — and affecting, in the end — is his refusal to sentimentalize them, combined with his assiduous avoidance of easy stereotypes. Jane may be a pushy stage mother, going so far as to manipulate her son cruelly to get him to make the most financially advantageous decisions, but she’s also a loving and protective parent.

Jonny’s bodyguard and tutor, too, may initially seem as if they’d stepped out of central casting, but they also prove to be caring guardians eager to keep their young charge from being hermetically sealed in a celebrity bubble.

As for Jonny, he — like the hero of “Kapitoil” — is a highly observant and thoughtful narrator, caught up in the swirl of big-time American success, but with growing intimations of its dark side. Mr. Wayne does not reduce him to a showbiz victim — part of him wants the fame and acclaim as much as his mother — but neither does he make him one of those pushy wunderkinds, willing to mortgage everything for another step up the ladder of fame.

Instead, Mr. Wayne depicts Jonny as a complicated, searching boy, by turns innocent and sophisticated beyond his years, eager to please and deeply resentful, devoted to his unusual talent and aware of both its rewards and its costs. This is what makes “The Love Song” more than a scabrous sendup of American celebrity culture; it’s also a poignant portrait of one young artist’s coming of age.