POOR Jonny Valentine, the uber-talented Bieberesque hero of Teddy Wayne's new novel, "The Love Song of Jonny Valentine." Sure, the 11-year-old singing, dancing heartthrob has money and fame, a cute fake girlfriend, six tour buses, even a namesake haircut. But it's just beginning to dawn on Jonny that he's a confection - manufactured, managed and manipulated by a corporate team of adults, led by his cool, carb-counting mother.

Onto these thin, prepubescent shoulders, the very funny Wayne has heaped the full weight of our obnoxious, vacuous, fame-sodden culture. It speaks well of both Jonny and his creator that the result is this good, a moving, entertaining novel that is both poignant and pointed - a sweet, sad skewering of the celebrity industry.

Wayne made his comic bones writing for The New Yorker and McSweeney's, and his satirist's eye is impeccable. As in "Kapitoil," his first novel, "The Love Song of Jonny Valentine" also shows Wayne to be a gifted ventriloquist. In fact, so limpidly does Wayne imitate the voice of a preteen celebrity, he risks making it look easy.

It's tricky enough writing a first-person novel with a character whose observations run along the lines of "Jane is like, Let the paparazzi take your photo but make it look like you're not letting them take it" and "Me and Walter hit the executive hotel gym that was reserved for celebrities and superrich people." But to create out of that entitled adolescent voice a being of true longing and depth, and then to make him such a devastating weapon of cultural criticism - these are feats of unlikely virtuosity, like covering Jimi Hendrix on a ukulele.

"When you've seen a million pictures of yourself, you start to see yourself in other people's features sometimes," Jonny tells us as he considers the photo of a man claiming to be his long-lost father. "Most people don't see themselves so much besides in the mirror. ... But I see so many photos of myself that I can picture myself in them better than I can picture my own reflection."

Painfully lonely

Discovered on the Internet as a heavenly voiced busker, Jonny has experienced a rise both meteoric and by the book - carefully engineered by a crack team of stylists, trainers, vocal coaches, publicists and, most of all, a terrifying stage mother who weighs him every time he steps on the tour bus. ("Three packages of candy. Thirty-two minutes on the bike.") Jane, as he calls her, handles every aspect of his career, Twitter feed to talking points: "Jane's been trying to get me to say hella more in interviews to make up for any conversational accent I have left from St Louis."

But the Angel of Pop is in transition. Sales of his new album and tour are a little soft, and with his 12th birthday approaching, the label execs decide he should sound "a tad more ... adult. Nothing drastic - we're just talking clothes, hair, and songs and videos that connect more with the teen audience and not so much the tween demo." As part of this strategy, they've also assigned him a girlfriend, a child actress "whose first album drops in February. She's a total sweetheart, and she's immensely popular with Latinos." After a staged ice cream date, the painfully lonely Jonny suggests they hang out for real sometime, only to find out she prefers keeping her "professional and social lives separate."

It's telling that this cynical stuff feels so realistic, so strangely ... grounded. Of course, a crass record company flack would try to age an 11-year-old singer by sexing him up a little. In this canny setup, Wayne may have invented a new genre - the forced-coming-of-age novel.

No one understands the strategy shift more than Jonny, an encyclopedia of marketing savvy keenly aware that his tour is leading up to a critical pay-per-view gig at Madison Square Garden. He's never played the Garden before, because of "gate-receipt conflicts with the bookers," and he needs it for "exposure breakthrough in the untapped Asian market" and a "brand-perception game changer."

So it's with a desperation that goes beyond the normal adolescent agony that Jonny watches for the arrival of pubic hair and exhibits a commitment to mastering the art of self-pleasure that might make Alex Portnoy blush.

The novel's tour structure works well. We see Jonny backstage with his only friends: his tutor and his bodyguard. We see him playing an immersive video game and sneaking into his mother's hotel room for sleeping pills. We see him trolling the Internet for concert reviews, sick blog posts and news of his father. We see him attending industry meetings and suffering through an awful party with older kids who think his music is lame. We see him in concert, pulling a girl onstage for some carefully scripted romantic banter - "a security guy picked her up and put her next to me. She kept saying to herself, 'omg omg omg.' She was actually saying 'omg,' not 'Oh, my God'."

The real deal

And when the label sends an older band to be his opening act, and the rockers sneak him out to a nightclub, we see Jonny's inevitable scandal-pocked future. We've heard this song enough to know the verses by heart - rebellious teenage transgression, media firestorm, careful public apology - but Wayne shows it from the inside out.

He's smart to make Jonny the real deal - a true prodigy whose assessments of other entertainers are spot on and generous. As sad as he is, Jonny wants all of this. His role model is Michael Jackson, a singer Jonny knows so well he can tell you the number of beats per minute in MJ's songs.

This complexity of character is the perfect balance for such sharp satire; even Jane reveals more depth than you first imagine. It's another thing a reader might take for granted, the sophisticated ambiguity of relationships that Wayne can reflect through the distorted lens of an 11-year-old boy king on the lookout for pimples.

The novel has its zits, too. Like a pop song, its themes and rhythms seem a little clean, a little manufactured. As the book drives toward Jonny finding his father, the drumbeats of an allegorical video game he's playing ("I couldn't believe they'd make the emperor this easy to get to") become heavy-handed, as do the allusions to books on slavery that his tutor has assigned.

But these are like technical glitches at a Jonny Valentine concert. They don't dull the enjoyment of hearing a perfect voice, and in the end it's the voice that pulls you into this novel. Embodying a character who might be easy to dismiss, Wayne has crafted a funny, affecting tour of our cultural wasteland.

When Jonny finally persuades his loyal bodyguard to bring an older groupie back to his hotel room, the result is so heartbreakingly awkward - "I could have told her she was the first girl I'd even kissed except for Alyssa Hernandez in a game of spin the bottle in fourth grade" - you'd have to be made of triple platinum not to ache for Jonny Valentine.