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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #410669 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-08
• Released on: 2008-04-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

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 next 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

From Publishers Weekly
Lethem (Fortress of Solitude; Motherless Brooklyn; etc.) strays from hometown Brooklyn to recount the near-fame experience of a Los Angeles alternative rock band. Its success depends on bass guitarist Lucinda Hoekke, an unwitting femme fatale whose irrational whims torture the artsy Gen-Xers in her orbit. When the novel opens, she's answering phones for a complaint line designed to also function as a "theatrical piece" and is charmed by the eloquent gripes of one serial caller, a professional phrase writer named Carl. (He's responsible for coining "All thinking is wishful," among others.) They embark on a sex-drenched bender that culminates with the band's debut performance—a breakout success. Lucinda is the band's "secret genius," having provided the ideas for the catchiest songs; only she cribbed them from Carl, whose cooperation must be purchased with a token position in the band. Zany disaster ensues in this entertaining but largely insubstantial romantic farce. Lethem tricks out the plot with his usual social wit (music moguls are "unyouthful men in youthful clothes"), but from a writer whose previous books have carved new notches on the literary wall, this measures up as stunted growth. (Mar. 13)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Joe Heim

Lucinda Hoekke plays bass in a Los Angeles rock band that doesn't have a name, has never played a gig and whose songwriter can't come up with any new songs. To make matters worse, the central character in Jonathan Lethem's peculiar, funny and occasionally surreal new novel has just broken up with her boyfriend, Matthew (the band's singer), and lost her job as a barista. Her future is not so bright that she needs to wear shades.

To make ends meet, Lucinda agrees to answer phones for the Complaint Line, an art project where anonymous callers register their unhappiness about anything and everything: "The complainers spoke of their husbands and wives and lovers and children, from cubicles of their own they whispered their despair at being employed, they called to disparage the quality of restaurants and hotels and limousines, they whined of difficulties moving their bowels or persuading anyone to read their screenplays or poetry. They fished for her sympathy." Adding a playful touch, Lethem includes the complaint line number on the back cover. Feeling whiny? Call 213-291-7778. Trust us, it works.

Lucinda quickly tires of all but one caller, "the brilliant complainer, who interested her entirely too much." For Lucinda, there is just something about what happens when they talk that she can't shake, and soon she is clinging to his every word, replaying and dissecting every conversation, discerning meaning and import in his odd phrases and unintentional aphorisms. Whether it's love or confusion is difficult to gauge, but Lucinda quickly sheds anonymity and begins an affair with the Complainer.

At the same time, she also begins feeding the strangely inspirational things he says to her to the band's songwriter. He, in turn, adds his own lyrics, works out arrangements, and -- voila -- the band is finally going places.

This may seem the makings of a fairly flimsy plot for a novel, and in many respects it is. But then this is less a novel than a cultural manifesto about plagiarism. You see, just as the band's fortunes seem set to take off, the Complainer -- an older, slovenly and bloated figure who is somehow rich though he doesn't have a job and somehow appealing despite his misanthropy -- decides that the band's songs are really his and that he wants in on the action.

When the band's drummer asks about his intentions, the Complainer responds, "I want what we all want. To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the external world, to see if they can be embraced." As he insinuates himself into the band, the Complainer's passive-aggressive demands hasten the group's destruction. By insisting on what are, at best, tangential claims to the songs, by claiming that he is being plagiarized, he kicks the band in its creative kneecap and sends it tumbling before its artistry can be realized.

Plagiarism is on Lethem's mind these days. Far from decrying it, he embraces the dirty word, making the case that it is an essential part of the artistic process. "It becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production," he writes in a devilishly clever essay on plagiarism titled "The Ecstasy of Influence" in Harper's February issue.

Lethem puts forward the arguments for plagiarism more elliptically in this novel, but the questions are the same: Do artists own their creations, or is the creative process a never-ending collage, a cut-and-paste of conscious and subconscious influences that is by its very nature plagiaristic? As if to emphasize his thesis that all art is in some sense borrowed, Lethem begins his book with lyrics from songs by the Vulgar Boatmen and Roky Erickson. Both songs share the same title: "You Don't Love Me Yet."

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Friends, with occasional music
This is a more modest work than Fortress of Solitude or Motherless Brooklyn. It depicts a world much like the one seen in the long-running television show: Friends. The four band members have no spouses or children and little commitment to mostly meaningless jobs. They all get along and surmount the minor challenges posed by their lives. A break-up in one relationship leads not to heartbreak but to another partner in short order. Band member Matthew kidnaps a kangaroo from his job at the zoo but is allowed to return, animal in hand, to resume work with no harm and no foul.

The main character appreciates this existance. She prefers her friends to be "benign, enchanted and fond." Band members, Lucinda says, are "the dreamers, the fools, her only friends." She is 29, however, and recognizes at books end that she and Matthew are on the verge of "the true complete lives in which they would at last drown, the oceanic voyage into their thirties and beyond, through which their inchoate yearnings would be either soothed or disappointed, or both."

This book is fun to read in the same way Friends is enjoyable to watch. We enter a world of youth, absent of responsibilities and pain, in which we are led to believe everything will work out as we hope or the rough equivalent. Lethem tells us through Lucinda that "the answer to any remaining question was yes." She leaves hesitation behind and opens herself and her friends to wild magic in the form of the The Complainer. This encounter leaves band members changed and undamaged; safely deposited back where they began.

Perhaps referring to himself, Lethem has the only true artist in the book describe his role in this way: "I want what we all want...To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the external world, to see if they can be embraced."

I would give You Don't Love Me Yet a cool embrace. It is fun but not very substantial. It left me with the same feeling I get from watching Friends. The characters seem to have more fun than I do without the interludes of pain, bodedom, angst, etc. I know it is supposed to be upbeat but I feel vaguely cheated. But that's just me.

I would read this but wait for the paperback version. The hardcover text seems almost too weighty for the content.

Not so great, but...
3 stars seems about right. "Fortress of Solitude" was magnificent, although it was geared toward an audience of a particular age, that would get all the cultural references. The new novel also is based largely on Lethem's love of music, and tries to delve into the creative process. However, he doesn't quite make it. None of it really seems to add up to anything particularly grand or meaningful. As one example, there is a subplot with a kidnapped kangaroo that Lethem seems to tire of, and just let go. This seems like something unfinished that he thought, "Oh well, let's just publish this and move on." Interesting enough, but don't expect to be wowed.

I kept waiting for the book to happen

I think Lethem is a genius. By that I mean he's original & leads me places few writers do. I also think that the writing profession is fraught with danger--in most professions mediocre days are forgiven while we wait for better ones. Those 2 things being said, I found this book weak, although entertaining, insightful, & well written. I kept waiting for the book to blossom. After finishing it, I "got" it, but I was left with a disatisfied feeling, wondering if Jonathan Lethem was in a way trying to be a disappointment artist.