IN THE ROOMS of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” In the stadiums of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, tween girls scream “Jonny, Jonny” for the eleven-year-old pop angel who narrates Teddy Wayne’s second novel. Though adored by millions, the Bieber-esque Jonny, like Prufrock, seeks more intimate relations. In search of such connection, during the multi-city tour from Los Angeles to New York City around which the book is structured, Jonny will maneuver to evade his micro-managing mother’s control; learn about sex through overheard conversations and a spied-upon assignation; and engage in a furtive email correspondence with a man who could be either his father or a sexual predator, or possibly both. The novel thus has a double plot: Jonny’s quest for sexual initiation and his search for paternal guidance, with the latter being a possible key to the former.

Jonny’s journey into the spotlight began when a school music teacher recognized his vocal gift; subsequently his mother put him out busking in their native St. Louis. A video of Johnny performing went viral on YouTube, and soon the child’s bubble-gum image was being constructed by a recording label and exploited by teen media. Even Jonny himself sees how this insipid public identity has been shaped; to emphasize the novel’s satire of star-making, Wayne depicts Jonny reading the documents that sustain his celebrity: press releases, fawning blogs, newspaper reviews, a magazine article by one “Andy Tweedy” (an authorial anagram).

The novel offers parallels to Huck Finn, and an allusion to Stephen Dedalus — both characters searching, like Johnny, for a father figure. Jonny studies escaped slave narratives and has a Jim-like bodyguard in the kindly Walter, who is separated from his own family. He also finds a Bloom-like mentor in Zack, leader of the Latchkeys, Jonny’s opening act. While the novel vouches for the power of Jonny’s singing voice, these literary echoes call attention — by obvious contrast with Twain and Joyce — to the fact that Jonny’s narrative voice is that of a child whose constant frame of reference is a video game he plays compulsively — when he’s not trying to coax semen out of his pre-adolescent erections. Wayne contrasts Jonny’s immature emotional life, and his strings of compound sentences, which often begin with a solecism such as “Me and Walter,” with the young star’s savvy about the music industry; Jonny knows about sound checks, throat gargles, green rooms, product placement, and marketing tie-ins. In one illustration of his insider perspective, Jonny meditates on modifying his demographic, following a staged and much-photographed date with a slightly older actress:

The Lisa Pinto exposure made sense from a packaging-strategy perspective, since even if it was driving off some of the fat girls, it would bring in more of the pretty girls, and if they liked me then the fat girls would like me more to try to be like the pretty girls, plus the pretty girls would bring their boyfriends to my concerts, which effectively doubled gate receipts and they also had to buy them crap merch to make them happy, but the fat girls didn’t have boyfriends. They had to buy the crap merch for themselves to feel happier.

Jonny often seems worldly beyond h...