You Don’t Love Me Yet Jonathan Lethem

You Don’t Love Me Yet  Jonathan Lethem

Overview:

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?

“Smart and funny . . . a biting satirical take on the intersection of art and commerce, integrity and façade. . . . A send up of all things cool.” —Los Angeles Times

“Fit to be devoured over a weekend.” —Rolling Stone

“A gentle and hip romantic comedy [that] breezes through LA's iconoclastic anonymity with a refreshing sincerity.”
—The Independent

“His best since Gun, With Occasional Music . . . what makes the book sing are Lethem's accounts of what happens when a crowd on the street hears a band inside a building . . . or when for a moment four musicians understand each other better than anyone of them understands him or herself.”
—Greil Marcus, Interview

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And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!