The Love Song of Jonny Valentine by Teddy Wayne

Wayne clearly creates two different personas for Jonny. Onstage, we see Jonny Valentine, beloved by masses of teen girls, a star who sings, dances and connects to girls who don’t fit traditional standards of beauty. He writes songs like “Girls Vs. Boys” and “Roses For Rosie.”

Behind the scenes, his manager mother, Jane, directs every aspect of his life. The only other people with whom Jonny interacts happen to be members of his team: a voice coach, a personal chef, a private tutor, a bodyguard. All the friends from the time before his singing career took off stayed behind in St. Louis. Jonny willingly forgets his past in favor of a more glamorous life in a Los Angeles mansion.

At the outset of the novel, Jonny’s new record lags on the charts, criticism of his music from the mainstream press looms large, and his mother fends off pressure from Jonny’s record label to institute changes to his management. Jane keeps Jonny incredibly sheltered. He has no access to his own social media outlets, except when he secretly accesses his mother’s computer and discovers his estranged father may be trying to find him. As Valentine embarks on a national tour building to a culminating performance at Madison Square Garden on Valentine’s Day (broadcast on the Internet with access at a nominal fee), he no longer expresses enthusiasm for his work. Life has already made Jonny a tour-weary workhorse who reaps less benefit from his efforts than his hard-partying mother.

Jonny’s family life resembles Macaulay Culkin’s, or at its darkest moments, that of Michael Jackson or Judith Barsi. Though not physically abusive in the Joan Crawford vein, Jane only finds interest in parenting so long as it keeps Jonny on the path to continued stardom. She despises her own past struggles, and repeatedly manipulates Jonny into doing what is good for her instead of fostering his own goals.

Jane keeps Jonny so constrained that he can’t do anything to send the lucratively successful pop train off the rails. But we still have one glaring certainty: She can’t prevent him from growing up.

Despite meetings with label executives, vocal coaches, and PR reps to massage Jonny’s image and ease the transition from teeny bop to more adult pop music, Jane fiercely protects the golden goose. Unwilling to let Jonny be himself or become his own agent of change, Jane runs on cold fear that the money will one day dry up.

Cracks show. Tour life, especially when accompanied by a group of erudite rockers as an opening band, leads to experimentation with alcohol and sex, though fumbling and insecure. Wayne’s message comes clear; preventing a child from growing up builds pressure. It turns gradual, natural release into a powder keg of youthful rebellion that can explode.

Wayne’s most astute observation of child entertainers comes at one of the novel’s most contrived junctures. Jonny’s label pairs him with an up-and-coming young female singer on its roster, Lisa Pinto. They join a staged photo-shoot for the rumor mill press. While the shoot results in nice photographs, Jonny makes an attempt to actually connect with Pinto, who shoots him down when he asks her out on a real date. She tells him her parents barely speak English, and that not every child entertainer has their mother slavishly controlling every aspect of their life. Instead of self-introspection, Jonny reassures himself by retreating into questionable veteran status, predicting Pinto’s future stardom:

She’d make it as an actress and as a singer, because she wasn’t a normal kid. She was an adult in a kid’s body. If you were just a kid in a kid’s body, you might make it too, as long as you had good management. If you weren’t either, it was harder to tell.

While Jonny can recognize that ability in another performer, he doesn’t know exactly where he stands. He knows he’s not an adult. He harbors doubts about his mother’s management, especially as he works around her barriers to the outside world. Does he fall uncomfortably into that last category, with an uncertain future? But all kids have uncertain futures, and Jane’s tight grip on Jonny’s life for the sake of brand security threatens to choke out any potential growth.

As the tour reaches New York, Jonny begins to spin out of control … but not as much as his mother. The opening band gets the boot for taking Jonny out on the town with them. Jane lands herself in the hospital. Finally, Jonny accompanies his bodyguard to visit an ex-wife and kids. The final on-stage performance means to offer hope, but that dissipates when Jonny meets his father … then finds out exactly where dad’s been since abandoning Jonny as a child.

Wayne presents an intriguing take on the consequences of acutely focused preteen star coverage, but the narrative ends with no satisfying conclusion. The tour hardens Jonny, makes him stoic and unapproachable, unable to connect with kids his own age. He appears doomed to a life of perpetual performance.

If nothing else, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine displays the tragic consequences of saddling a boy, on the cusp of adolescence, with grossly unfair expectations.

Kevin McFarland is a freelance writer from the San Francisco Bay Area currently living in Lake Tahoe with his Alaskan Malamute named Dynamite. He writes regularly about books and television for The A.V. Club. You can follow him on Twitter @km_mcfarland