The book started out great, I felt sad every time I put it down to do something else. Really, I can't express in words how stunning the first part was. The second part was a let down in light of how great the first part was. Not to say that it was bad, I just didn't enjoy it as much. There was resolution, it just wasn't as thrilling as the beginning. ( )

(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.)

Soon after opening CCLaP in the summer of 2007, one of the first books I had a chance to review was what at the time was Jonathan Lethem's latest, You Don't Love Me Yet; and as long-time readers remember, I found that book to be a nearly unreadable pile of horsesh-t, so bad in fact that it served as the inaugural entry of my old "Too Awful to Finish" essay series, a series I eventually shut down again because of it being just too damn mean. And that's when I started hearing from all of Lethem's fans, telling me that I should give this grad-student panty-moistener another chance, that I had simply picked the wrong book of his to start out with. "Read The Fortress of Solitude instead!" all these academes argued. "That's the good one! You'll like that! That's the one that got all the award nominations! You'll like that one!"

So this week I finally did, yet another older title I'm getting caught up with through new "Netflix for books" service BookSwim.com, which I'm in the middle of a courtesy two-month membership with, in exchange for doing a write-up about my experience here in mid-December. And it was at this point (in fact, about 50 pages in, the point when I angrily gave up on this book) that I realized that a little theory I've had about the arts for some time now seems to be coming more and more true with every new book I read, with every year I continue being a book critic: namely, academes don't know what the f-ck they're talking about, and in the process are completely wrecking the entire literary industry we all used to know and love. I mean, how else to explain these people's baffling love for this unmitigated piece of garbage, which much like Augusten Burroughs presents a ridiculously overwritten, pop-culture-laced memoir of 1970s Gen-X childhood, featuring excruciatingly precious slang-filled magic-realism dialogue and with insanely too much gravitas assigned to such plotless meanderings as kids watching bad television and eavesdropping on their intellectual parents' insultingly banal conversations?

And then I realized -- oh, right, of course, this is an early-2000s novel by a white academe about how much white people suck (specifically, the story of the "re-whitening" of Brooklyn starting in the late '70s, after the New York borough turning into an ethnic slum following World War Two, a process called "gentrification" that has by 2009 turned nearly the entire city into a Caucasian hipster fantasyland); and man, if there's one thing that's become an undeniable truism by now, it's that back in the '90s and early '00s, academes tended to automatically fall in love with preciously overwritten screeds by self-loathing white males about the horrors of their fellow Caucasians, with the same kind of burning passion that, say, dogs love licking their own f-cking balls.

F-CK YOU, SELF-LOATHING GRAD STUDENTS! Stop ruining the entire subject of literature for the rest of us by falsely trumpeting these unreadable pieces of horsesh-t by such preciously twee suck-ass fellow self-loathing academes! J-sus F-cking Chr-st, no godd-mn wonder that the general public has stopped reading novels anymore, when you all keep running around handing out awards to execrable f-cking turds like this! Please, PLEASE, for the love of GOD, no more worshipping of overwritten plotless Gen-X pop-culture-obsessed '70s-memoir drivel! PLEASE! STOP! I'M F-CKING BEGGING YOU! STOP! STOP! STOP!

Out of 10: 0.0 ( )

Lethem's novel is set in Boerum Hill in Brooklyn in the 1970's, 80's, & 90's and tells of the friendship of two boys: Dylan Ebdus one of the few white children in the neighborhood and his black friend and idol Mingus Rude. Both boys live with fathers who are artists and emotionally distant from their sons and their mothers are completely absent from their lives. So Dylan and Mingus have to make it on their own. Lethem excels in the parts of the novel when his characters are younger and capturing the street scene of 1970's Brooklyn - the games, the language, and the uneasy state of race relations. There's also a magical element to the novel when Dylan finds a ring that allows him and Mingus to fly and they use it to try to fight crime. Along the way the novel takes on many topics and tangents such as music of the 70's & 80's (from R&B to punk), the tagging culture, drug abuse, the lucky breaks Dylan gets from white privilege, and gentrification. Dylan ruminates about feeling invisible in the mostly black neighborhood and the duality of his life in black Brooklyn and at his white high school and college. I have no way of knowing for sure if Lethem was alluding to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk for these concepts of invisibility and duality, but either way it's a bold move to apply these traits to the white character.

While overall this is a great novel and one I wanted to keep listening too, there are a few flaws. For one thing I found it hard to believe that two teenage boys would make as little use of a magic ring as they did, although I appreciate Lethem's efforts to show that having magic powers in the "real world" can be more complicated than in comic books. I also felt that the book may have been more successful if it ended earlier, at the end of Dylan and Mingus' childhood with the liner notes "Part II" as an epilogue. While "Part III" focusing on Dylan and Mingus as adults is interesting and has some really strong pieces, I felt that Dylan the narrator and Lethem the author were trying way too hard to find an explanation for Dylan's childhood and some closure too the detriment of the novel overall.

( )

Brooklyn in the '70s, '80s, and '90s. Two boys: Dylan is white, Mingus is black. This is a "huge" book in the sense of the ground it covers, yet keeps the reader enthralled. This is really the story of Dylan's life told through his eyes and through the music he loves. Realistic view of families and race with the theme of abandonment threading through all of it. Excellent writing. Highly recommended. ( )

Excellent for 90% of the novel. Disappointing end. ( )