You Don't Love Me Yet (Vintage Contemporaries) | 
|  | | | Title: | You Don't Love Me Yet (Vintage Contemporaries) | | Author: | Jonathan Lethem | | Publisher: | Vintage | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 08 April, 2008 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 140007682X / 9781400076826 | | List Price: | $13.95 | | You Save: | $2.79 | | Amazon Price: | $11.16 | |
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| Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:
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
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
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Customer Reviews:
• What Happened? 29 July, 2008
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 humor of his earlier, less pretentious, novels. We all pray for a speedy recovery...
- Reviewed by customer ID: AD323PF164Y2N
• Pretty Good 03 August, 2008
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).
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1H6QZLW6YSZIA
• A Trifle 29 May, 2008
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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3SJ2AT4FHNGVM
• I Didn't Read It 03 May, 2008
I am a big Lethem fan. I bought Gun when it came out in hardback and have read everything since. Except this.
I read the first 50 pages and was just puzzled as to why it seemed like a screenplay for a movie starring Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck. I have a rule that says if a book isn't good by the first 50 pages I put it down. It may be silly to many but I struggled through far too many books and found that my intial suspicions were correct.
But for Lethem I obviously was willing to throw that rule aside. I decided though to read the reviews and I saw that I was not alone in my initial impression.
So Lethem has written one that is better forgotten it seems. I will still be buying his next one though.
I am writing this review to those who are thinking about reading this one...save the money and read Motherless Brooklyn, As she climbed across the table, or Gun and occasional music.
Or give it a go...and tell me the ending. But after 50 pages I find myself not caring about the characters or the ending. Im not saying its bad...its just readable...but for a brilliant writer like Lethem, thats unnaceptable.
I gave it three stars out of fairness that I didn't actually finish it.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1DFQGBVYHZQP1
• Atonal. 12 January, 2008
The novel sketches the rise and fall of an arty L.A. indie rock band in a way that's often charming and plausible, but also deeply idiosyncratic. The events of the plot are the material of broad comedy (one of the main characters kidnaps a live kangaroo from the zoo) but the tone is strangely wistful and romantic. I wasn't especially taken with the protagonist, Lucinda, who starts off witty and imaginative but by the end has turned into an oversexed cipher.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A28P34VB5AQPEY
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