(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Too Awful to Finish: An ongoing essay series

The Accused: You Don't Love Me Yet, by Jonathan Lethem

How far I got: 99 pages (about halfway through)

Crimes:
1) Asking us to give a rat's ass about the truly miserable indie-rock characters on display -- possibly the most untalented, pretentious, snotty, empty-headed, navel-gazing Los Angeles losers the world of contemporary literature has ever given us.

2) Reminding us of just how many of these circle-jerk losers end up internationally famous as part of the indie-rock scene, in many cases because of some postmodern media-celebrity-slash-performance-artist who is usually snottier and less tolerable than even them. Yeah, thanks, Lethem; like being an underground artist isn't f---ing depressing enough.

3) Positing a world where an attractive, empowered female bass player would become obsessed with one of the most obviously misogynistic woman-hating literary characters I've come across in years; so obsessed, in fact, that she starts creating lyrics for her band around the obliquely sexist things the man tells her during their anonymous phone-complaint sessions, which of course are part of a super-duper-pretentious conceptual-art installation piece that the bass player has been hired to be a part of (don't ask, seriously, SERIOUSLY, don't ask).

4) Living in Brooklyn. Yeah, you heard me.

Verdict: Oh, so guilty.

Sentence: A five-year exile from the traditional literary industry, writing snotty CD reviews instead for Pitchfork. Seriously, Doubleday -- you need to start peddling this crap to pretentious 19-year-old indie-rockers who don't know any better, and leave us intelligent people the f--k alone. ( )

Ah, Jonathan Lethem. Even when you give us lightweight confection you delight us with your clever comparisons, your wonderful dialog, and your uncanny ability to give voice to those sensations and feelings we thought could never be put into words.

Case in point: You Don't Love Me Yet.

On the surface it's a story about a girl in a rock band who during the day mans a "complain line" as part of an art experiment (this is Los Angeles, after all). One of her regular complainers has such a way with words that she co-opts his complaints as lyrics, which kick start the band to new levels. The catch? At their first gig the Complainer (as he's called) hears the new stuff and wants in. Wackiness ensues.

The admittedly brief synopsis above doesn't begin, however, to describe the experience of reading You Don't Love Me Yet, and doesn't hint at the many explorations of love and relationships, and the nature of music and how it affects not only the people listening to it, but the people making it as well. Lethem is a writer I'm proud to say I've been turned onto ever since his first novel Gun, With Occasional Music and although he's moved away from the science fiction to mainstream (if you can call it that) literative fiction and all the accolades that accompany, his biggest strength of conveying ideas and emotions directly to the reader has only gotten better with time. If you're a musician and you've ever played in front of a crowd you'll love this book - his description of what happens to a crowd during a show is spot-on, and the characterizations of the various band members are uncanny in how they at once embrace everything that's both romantic and realistic about the "struggling musician" type.

Very quick, very enjoyable. Now please get to work on something epic along the lines of your last novel The Fortress of Solitude. ( )

The whole thing reads like a bad version of Singles for people who are even more pretentious. Singles was pretty pretentious to start off with and wasn’t that great a movie either.

(Full review at my blog) ( )

Ratings for this book seem to be all over the charts and I can understand why. The characters are not drawn to be particularly likable and their motivations are scarcely known. But for young rock star wanna be's this little novel portrays the desires and challenges of playing in a band. ( )

A more fun read than his "Fortress of Solitude," but it feels much more slight. The characters aren't as interesting, their relationships not as complex ... enough for a tv dramedy, but not for a novel. But Lethem's got an agreeable style and he makes the story of the band, its brush with near greatness, feel like that time you saw that really cool local band you were sure were going to go places and you'd be able to say, "I saw them when they were playing 'Volcanic Action of My Soul' in grotty co-ops back in Madison" to folks when they were huge. But Trenchmouth never took off and I don't think ths novel really will either. ( )

Being a moody reader, I wanted something light and fun, You Don't Love Me Yet did not disappoint. The plot was authentic yet absurd. Authenticity was reflected in the maturity of the characters, who in their early-mid 20s don't hesitate to spend their (respective) last-dime on a pack of cigarettes, work in dead-end jobs, or blow-off an important project for school. Absurdity was abundant in frank descriptions of person, character and kangaroo.
The lead singer of a struggling alternative rock band, Lucinda earns her rent by answering calls for the Los Angeles Complaint Line, an artsy, unprofitable business venture of her college friend. There are many insightful one-liners in the book, especially from 'THE complainer' Carl, who Lucinda falls for.
[You Don’t love Me Yet] is not Lethem’s most loved, well known title (see Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude) for two reasons:
1) There was very little character development during the course of the novella
2) Lethem attempted to include a great quantity of casual sex, in the first-person POV, perhaps to authenticate Lucinda’s lack of age and maturity. Attempts to adequately describe such activity in the first-person may be better left to someone of the same gender. ( )

An interesting hybrid of satire and sincerity, but I never developed much interest in the characters. ( )

This is probably my 5th or 6th Lethem but my least favorite. It's the first one without fantastic elements also so I'm sure that's part of it.

Lethem used to represent a kind of unknown quantity for me. It was the genius of experimentation that sometimes didn't work but when it did it REALLY did. In this novel it seems that he has turned to a more limited but polished style. There are some ridiculous scenes in the book but nothing absolutely absurd.

You can tell that he really loves to take something that's been described a million times and attempt to describe it differently. That's good but it gets to be a bit much. It seemed that ALL of his characters were extremely clever, even while high. Unfortunately that rang very untrue for me. It just made the characters unreal puppets with the author's voice. Not to say that they weren't well developed because I think they were. It was just the ultra-deep dialogue that made them unreal.

So if you're into clever writing give this one a shot. It's short anyway. ( )

http://notablereading.blogspot.com/20... ( )

http://www.iwilldare.com/2007/04/24/y... ( )

http://www.zapbangmagazine.com/litera... ( )

You Don't Love Me Yet is a short novel that demonstrates Lethem's love of music and music journalism. The mechanics of band society, first gigs, and collective songwriting were, as far as I could tell from my six-year relationship with a musician and basic experience as a human being, almost painful in their psychological accuracy. But it isn't a gritty story of breaking into the industry. It's a light, nearly surreal love story, light years away from Fortress of Solitude's grim weight. One significant character was so like Confederacy of Dunces' Ignatius P. Reilly that I could barely read him independently of the inevitable associations. I think this was my own comparison and certainly not anything deliberate. But it highlighted areas where the story seemed to want to fall into parodic buffoonery but never quite got there. What this books needs, I think, is a good vein of magical realism. Lethem's done so much excellent genre work that I felt this would surely tip over the edge into something properly surreal, as it threatened to, but it never rose above politely ridiculous. I've read someone else's opinion that this read like an early work, and I concur.

But here's the thing-- despite my initial indifference to this book, Lethem is owning the hell out of the bad reviews. According to him, in the post-Fortress days of critical acclaim and indie adulation, he told his wife "My next book will be my worst novel ever, no matter what I write. So I'm free to write anything!" It's already clear to the reader that You Don't Love Me Yet is the author's palate cleanser. Me, I initially found this insulting. It was like my favorite band came back for an encore-- playing kazoos. But I feel much better after hearing him describe it as a freeing exercise, a deliberately light book than owns nothing and claims no mastery (in contrast to the near autobiography of Fortress, Lethem is now writing about stuff he's never done [been in a band that nearly makes it] in a place he's never lived [Los Angeles]). He also acknowledged it as a deliberate comedy. Now, I thought the book's greatest sin was veering toward comedic magical realism without letting the story go all the way. If you write your love interest as an Ignatius P. Reilly figure, you have no business shying away from complete absurdity. But my misgivings are considerably assuaged now. It's okay that it's his worst book. It could never have been anything else.

He's better than this. The early promise of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress Of Solitude, and more recently his collection of pop culture essays The Disappointment Artist meant that big things were expected of Jonathan Lethem. Instead he takes a step backwards with this lazy tale of an arthouse rock band in implosion. Hidden amongst a lightweight romantic comedy with kooky complainers and sick kangaroos is a deeper, more satisfying book...yet Lethem under-performs spectacularly. Don't get me wrong, hidden amongst this mess is a real gem of a book - but its as if, even as we stumble to the conclusion, his heart just isn't in it anymore. And as a reader, I felt exactly the same. ( )