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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9781400076826
ISBN number: 140007682X
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 240
Printing Date: April 08, 2008
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: April 08, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 296643
Studio: Vintage
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Product Description:
Bestselling author Jonathan Lethem delivers a hilarious novel about love, art, and what it's like to be young in Los Angeles.
Lucinda Hoekke's daytime gig as a telephone operator at the Complaint Line—an art gallery's high-minded installation piece—is about as exciting as listening to dead air. Her real passion is playing bass in her forever struggling, forever unnamed band. But recently a frequent caller, the Complainer, as Lucinda dubs him, has captivated her with his philosophical musings. When Lucinda's band begins to incorporate the Complainer's catchy, existential phrases into their song lyrics, they are suddenly on the cusp of their big break. There is only one problem: the Complainer wants in.
Amazon.com Review:
With his sixth novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, Jonathan Lethem continues to show off his dexterity with the form, following up the coming-of-age epic The Fortress of Solitude with a dreamlike, comic portrait of the Los Angeles art scene. Lethem craftily sets up his ruse with a letter of complaint from Falmouth Strand (a seemingly minor character) who warns us that the book we are about to read completely misrepresents the truth. Falmouth is a former installation artist who has turned from sculpting objects to 'manipulating people's despair, pensiveness, ennui.' For his latest project, he has posted signs around Los Angeles: 'Complaints? Call 213 291 7778.' The novel centers around Lucinda (the perfect, unwitting instrument for Falmouth's manipulation), a bass player in a would-be indie rock quartet with nearly enough good songs for a 35-minute set (if you don't count the two they don't like anymore). Lucinda has vowed to stop sleeping with the band's lead singer Matthew (for real, this time), launching a search for true love as drunken and misguided as the band's search for a decent name. She abandons her upscale barista gig to answer complaint calls for Falmouth's conceptual art piece. Before long, she finds herself drawn to a regular whose curious words are 'like a pulse detected in a vast dead carcass' of daily complaints. By way of Lucinda, the 'genius' complainer's words spark the band's subsequent song, setting them on a shaky upward trajectory all too familiar in the art world. Various characters want (or don't want) to take credit for the song's apparent success, but who deserves it? The complainer who nonchalantly rattled off the words, Lucinda who wrote them down, the remaining band members who collaboratively put them to music, or Falmouth himself, who passively engineered the whole thing?
Fans of Fortress and Motherless Brooklyn may find this novel's levity too drastic a shift, but even though Lethem is having a great time here with wordplay, a motley cast, and Lucinda's sexual meanderings, You Don't Love Me Yet is anything but a simple entertainment. He plays with our notions of art and authorship, enjoying a bit of advanced cribbery himself as he experiments with Shakespearean antics and inexplicable love match-ups. At every turn, Lethem seems to be asking sticky questions: Can anyone create the consummate intersection of dream, desire, and reality that art (and great sex) embodies? Will it last, and should it? Can any one writer capture that moment with a few meager words? If they did, how long would it take for it to be reduced to meaningless slogan? --Heidi Broadhead
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Rated by buyers 
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The usually intriguing Jonathan Lethem falters with this slow-moving, unremarkable, and disappointing novel - for some reason delving into a genre that is not his forte and which has already been done to death by lesser writers. The jacket blurb will have you believe the book is a send-up of romantic comedies with quirky characters. But if this is supposed to be a send-up, Lethem is only satirizing himself, delivering a story that became the very same type of genre tripe that he was probably trying to skewer.
The story is not romantic or comedic, and the characters are more incongruous than quirky. The plotting is slow and directionless, focused on messy but utterly unexceptional love lives that could be concocted by any writer of teen chick lit. With the exception of an inconsequential subplot about one of the characters kidnapping a supposedly depressed kangaroo, Lethem has dropped his knack for the insightfully surreal in favor of stereotypical angst and ennui among artsy hipsters. If Lethem meant to shed light on this scene, he's about a decade and a half behind schedule, with his characters exhibiting the "...whatever..." style of forced self-irony and detached cynicism that was fashionable for a few minutes back in the grunge era. Even Lethem's usually vibrant prose falls into the same malformed false subversion displayed by his characters - for example, "a kind of on-the-spot reconstruction of this music's sense in the very first place." Granted, there are a few surprise twists near the end of the story, but plodding melodrama swamps any empathy the reader may feel for the characters.
Lethem is capable of far more than this. Perhaps this utterly unaccomplished novel is the result of bad advice from an agent telling Lethem to go mainstream. Hopefully he'll soon return to his established strengths and leave this misstep behind him. [~doomsdayer520~]
Rated by buyers -
Lethem is known for his inventiveness, if for anything, and although his previous work flaunted more his intense, literary authenticity, it still had hints of his flair for the magical. YOU DON'T LOVE ME YET has little in the way of flair, and even less in the way of magic. Workably interesting but more smug than smart, the novel reads like the cracking of a famous pianist's knuckles.
Set in the culture cauldron of L.A.'s hipster scene, the story concerns the (mis)fortunes of a nameless band trying to make it big. The four members, teetering on the diminishing edge of their twenties, find themselves struggling with both latent brilliance and the malignant malaise that comes from, well, from being part of a struggling band in L.A.
Most of the story centers around Lucinda, the bass player, who ping pongs between ex-boyfriends (one, the lead singer, Matthew; the other, a conceptual artist, Falmouth). On the surface, she's trying to make sense of her life and dreams, but mostly she just gets drunk and lets herself get swept up into hopelessly predictable problems, most of them involving sex. It's literary lasciviousness, although it is occasionally funny. Unfortunately, the story is populated by naive, inconsequential, and unlikeable characters, every one of them (not the least of which our self-absorbed lead) treading water and pointing at the ripples around them as evidence of progress.
Although the themes here are suitably juicy (Lethem is trying to make a point about the creative process itself, the thin line between marketability and genius, the decay of all great ideas into cliche), mostly the book is just a parlour trick, and one you're likely to already know the secret to. For newcomers to Lethem, the book will be an amusing diversion, its love triangles, loving descriptions of music, and even the subplot about a kidnapped kangaroo, but for those who've experienced Lethem before (especially those who've seen what else he can do with kangaroos), it will likely be a niggling reminder that the man is capable of so much more.
Rated by buyers -
A cute book that was fun to read, if not altogether compelling or deep. I liked best the author's invention of random influences and odd shards of fate that shape the lives of the young folks (who happen to be roughly my age, although mostly a little younger).
Rated by buyers -
I agree with other readers disappointed with this book. After showing some wordsmithing chops in his earlier works, Lethem proved himself a novelist of real depth and sensitivity with both Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude. Unfortunately, You Don't Love Me Yet suggests that he's since come down with Tom Robbins syndrome; vacuous and unengaging, lacking even the humour of his earlier, less pretentious, novels. We all pray for a speedy recovery...
Rated by buyers -
Not Letham at his best, or even second best. While there is some stimulating writing (mostly anything The Complainer says), the protagonista is unlikable, as are most of the characters (except for the guitarist, obviously the author's stand-in). I actually wanted more about the kangaroo.
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