Book Review: You Don't Love Me Yet, by Jonathan Lethem

There are, one feels, slightly too many literary Jonathans. The mid-2000s were positively rotten with them, with notable books by Jonathans Franzen, Lethem, and Safran-Foer appearing seemingly every few weeks. From what I remember, I found Lethem to be the least objectionable of them; I haven't re-read any of his books aside from the subject of today's review in several years but I recall thinking that the one that's kind of like Blade Runner but with more talking animals was pretty good. Even when compared to the one that's kind of like Blade Runner but with more talking animals, You Don't Love Me Yet is a weird book.

The book takes place in Los Angeles in a vague time period that might be the early 1990s. The main characters are members of a fledgling band and their various bohemian friends. At the outset of the action, the band's singer and bass player have just broken up, while the drummer and guitarist are tentatively getting together. The bass player has quit working at a coffee shop so as not to run into her ex as often and is instead taking part in a conceptual art piece wherein she answers phones for a nonspecific complaint line. She becomes smitten with a regular complaint caller and starts using some of his turns of phrase as lyrics for songs. Meanwhile, the band's singer, her ex, kidnaps a kangaroo from the zoo where he works, in protest of the zoo director's mistreatment of her. There are a lot of descriptions of kangaroo pee.

Not, on the whole, a bad set of premises for a book, it's just poorly executed. The writing is very stylized, the characters are caricaturish, the rambling passages about what playing music feels like are incredibly lolsy ("Lucinda had read somewhere of the argument as to who derived the most pleasure from the sexual act, the male or the female. She felt certain the musical reply would be: the bass player." COME ON, MAN!) and the writing about sex and romance is kind of gross.

I will give the book credit for describing a drum beat as "peppery," that's a nice image. I will also say that the transcription of the process of writing lyrics for a song is reasonably accurate–a lot of "dunna nuh" filling in space between phrases that half rhyme with each other–it just makes for awkward and kind of unsatisfying reading. The book doesn't fall into the trap of writing out complete lyrics for songs and expecting the reader to enjoy them without being able to hear any instrumentation but this portion comes close.