You Don't Love Me Yet

Just think about the implications of the idea of a party where everyone is wearing headsets; thus, dancing to their own music while being together. This image was enough for me to ponder on for quite awhile. Plus, the song titles: "Astronaut Food" and "Monster Eyes", how cool. My brain is still picturing the kangaroo in the bathtub. I am going to San Pedro now to eat some crabs and drink a cool beer with another Jonathan Lethem book on hand.

I see that I'm not supposed to have liked it. Well, too late. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I've read most of his books, so I know what a great writer he is, and expected good writing here. I'm sure no one disagrees with me that he's an excellent writer. The complaints seem to be about the plot. I liked the plot for several unusual reasons. I grew up in the Silver Lake district. I'm just getting into playing music. I'm old enough to be able to look at a young woman's life in a detached way. I read a lot (mostly high class stuff), and mainly I like a book by the author's use of language, and the way he looks at things in ways I haven't. Those are my excuses.

What you derive from reading this book will depend on why (some might prefer to say 'how') you read it. The plot is deceptively simple, carried as with other of Lethem's writing by his careful description of sensible details. Surroundings, bodies, self-sensations--all are provided so the reader easily imagines being in the story with the characters. Lethem's careful noting of "meaningless" details is one of the things that gives his writing an offbeat quality, and for the most part, it is agreeable. The main character is a 29-year-old woman in a garage band, and the plot is largely constructed of her flickering attempts to find love/sex/closeness with someone. The someones change several times through the course of the story, and with varying results. There are other sub-themes, but this is the central one flowing throughout the story. One of the first and most important structures in the story is the call-in Complaint center where she works for a time. Her own ambivalence and oscillation between independence/intimacy is mirrored in the situation of her taking calls from complete strangers, asking them questions and making notes. This process unsurprisingly affects her, and she takes the professionally inappropriate step of speaking in a personal way with a man who she later meets. None of this captures the process of the book, which I predict will affect *you*, according to how you identify with her and with any of the other array of characters in the book (mostly, her band mates). The book is a processional of feeling "tests" peeling back to reveal a new, next layer, and not always with satisfying results. Good luck.

As soon as I finished Lethems' " Motherless Brooklyn" ( now being directed by and starring Edward Norton btw ) I picked up " You Dont Love me Yet".....A totally different type of book and amazingly enjoyable, funny, and impressively original. As a reader I literally laughed out loud, which I truly dont think i have ever done reading a novel....and as a writer I am amazed, absolutely in awe , at what an amazingly effective, concise and overall enjoyable novel this is. In my opinion he is the best Novelist we have and this proves it and adds to the variety he produces. If this guy wrote a bad check I would read it..........outstanding!

The novel is a pleasingly multi-leveled work. It can be viewed as a simple novel, a story of the hopes of a somewhat hopeless LA indie art-rock band living somewhere in the 1990s. We begin with a scene of Lucinda, the bass player and Matthew, the singer breaking up. They are ending their romantic sexual relationship but pledging to preserve what they consider worth saving, the band. But this band is clearly floundering. They have a few songs but seem to be blocked from making anymore. They have never had a gig and they are not even creative enough to come up with a name. They have a desire to be a band, but not really much to say. Out of left field comes a creative energy that becomes theirs. The creative energy of the band members, coming to the end of their 20s, is directly related to sexual energy. The band and their circle are sexually promiscuous. This is all a part of the life-force of creativity. Perhaps that is the power of the corporate lock down of artistic materials. The corporate owners exploit the unnatural patriarchal legalistic element of human society that is afraid of what would come if people were free to associate in a more open, sexy manner. If you can control the sexuality, you can control the product of that interaction. If you can control that product you can control its function. The sexual repression becomes the repression of free artistic interaction. A random creative entity, after joining the band becomes the three hundred pound gorilla in the room. He is out of place and destructive. The novel shows that the natural open-source way is the best way, perhaps the only way. The other way feels forced, constricting and in the end aesthetically just wrong. The novel opens out to perhaps it's only exterior scene in the end. The natural world for the first time enters the story. It's as if in the course of the story there has been an evolution of consciousness. The characters have matured, they are noticing that there is a world outside of themselves and they might be connected to it. It might act upon them as they attempt to act upon it. Lethem's novel is open to the flow of life. He knows that it is not just about him, but about is all, our connections with one another and our life on the planet, the planet that we are only a part of, and which is us. One can read my more complete thoughts at Slade Time.