Customer Reviews

You Don't Love Me Yet

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This is a more modest work than Fortress of Solitude or Motherless Brooklyn. It depicts a world much like the one seen in the long-running television show: Friends. The four band members have no spouses or children and little commitment to mostly meaningless jobs. They all get along and surmount the minor challenges posed by their lives. A break-up in one relationship leads not to heartbreak but to another partner in short order. Band member Matthew kidnaps a kangaroo from his job at the zoo but is allowed to return, animal in hand, to resume work with no harm and no foul.

The main character appreciates this existance. She prefers her friends to be "benign, enchanted and fond." Band members, Lucinda says, are "the dreamers, the fools, her only friends." She is 29, however, and recognizes at books end that she and Matthew are on the verge of "the true complete lives in which they would at last drown, the oceanic voyage into their thirties and beyond, through which their inchoate yearnings would be either soothed or disappointed, or both."

This book is fun to read in the same way Friends is enjoyable to watch. We enter a world of youth, absent of responsibilities and pain, in which we are led to believe everything will work out as we hope or the rough equivalent. Lethem tells us through Lucinda that "the answer to any remaining question was yes." She leaves hesitation behind and opens herself and her friends to wild magic in the form of the The Complainer. This encounter leaves band members changed and undamaged; safely deposited back where they began.

Perhaps referring to himself, Lethem has the only true artist in the book describe his role in this way: "I want what we all want...To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the external world, to see if they can be embraced."

I would give You Don't Love Me Yet a cool embrace. It is fun but not very substantial. It left me with the same feeling I get from watching Friends. The characters seem to have more fun than I do without the interludes of pain, bodedom, angst, etc. I know it is supposed to be upbeat but I feel vaguely cheated. But that's just me.

I would read this but wait for the paperback version. The hardcover text seems almost too weighty for the content.

3 stars seems about right. "Fortress of Solitude" was magnificent, although it was geared toward an audience of a particular age, that would get all the cultural references. The new novel also is based largely on Lethem's love of music, and tries to delve into the creative process. However, he doesn't quite make it. None of it really seems to add up to anything particularly grand or meaningful. As one example, there is a subplot with a kidnapped kangaroo that Lethem seems to tire of, and just let go. This seems like something unfinished that he thought, "Oh well, let's just publish this and move on." Interesting enough, but don't expect to be wowed.

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.

Having suggested this book for our book club as "something different" based on a review in Entertainment Weekly, I have become the scourge of our group and have been banned from making any further suggestions for one year.
Seriously, reviewers are making this book out to be WAY more than it could have been, favorably comparing it to the genius of the television show "Friends"... NO.
Lethem has a definite style and a keen grasp of plot and pacing, however, the characters are not worthy of a story, uninteresting, uncompelling repulsive? shallow. Possibly, that is Lethem's point.
One book club member theorized that, riding the success of his last novel, he spent six heady months in the LA underbelly masquerading as a band groupie looking for material for another book and this is the result.
I don't necessarily agree, but I am not as insightful as my compatriots.
I am not about to write off Lethem and will definitely read his other, highly praised novels. I don't love this author yet.

I think Lethem is a genius. By that I mean he's original & leads me places few writers do. I also think that the writing profession is fraught with danger--in most professions mediocre days are forgiven while we wait for better ones. Those 2 things being said, I found this book weak, although entertaining, insightful, & well written. I kept waiting for the book to blossom. After finishing it, I "got" it, but I was left with a disatisfied feeling, wondering if Jonathan Lethem was in a way trying to be a disappointment artist.

This is not my favorite of Jonathan Lethem's books. It is principally a slice-of-life story, more marked by a feeling of drift than a clear plot arc. There is such an arc, but since the characters themselves drift the plot seems to do so as well. The characters are well-defined but neither attractive nor engagingly unattractive. They are unanchored bohemians with flashes of intelligence and insight but little of enduring substance. They have no spiritual lives (in either a religious or secular sense) and their thoughts and actions are devoid of any moral urgency. They momentarily titillate, with (some of) their more sexualized behaviors but with the exception of Matthew's sympathies for a depressed kangaroo (so wildly implausible as to stretch and strain genre) there is next to no humanity in the book. There is also very little humor, despite the jacket cover description of the book as a send-up. There is also very little sense of place. The novel could be set anywhere and the notion that it somehow captures the quintessence of the alternative music scene in Los Angeles is decidedly exaggerated.

In short, the book is the absolute opposite of Lethem at the top of his form, as in MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN. That is not to suggest that there are not brilliant lines and passages (in addition to sloppy ones, with, for example, unidentified speaking voices), but the book conveys a feeling of general emptiness punctuated by casual sex and occasional cleverness, much of it too clever by half. The characters of MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN are very `different' but in engaging and attractive--even beautiful--ways. The characters in YOU DON'T LOVE ME YET are far more familiar. They are the kind of people your mother prays you will never become.

Lethem is known for his inventiveness, if for anything, and although his previous work flaunted more his intense, literary authenticity, it still had hints of his flair for the magical. YOU DON'T LOVE ME YET has little in the way of flair, and even less in the way of magic. Workably interesting but more smug than smart, the novel reads like the cracking of a famous pianist's knuckles.

Set in the culture cauldron of L.A.'s hipster scene, the story concerns the (mis)fortunes of a nameless band trying to make it big. The four members, teetering on the diminishing edge of their twenties, find themselves struggling with both latent brilliance and the malignant malaise that comes from, well, from being part of a struggling band in L.A.

Most of the story centers around Lucinda, the bass player, who ping pongs between ex-boyfriends (one, the lead singer, Matthew; the other, a conceptual artist, Falmouth). On the surface, she's trying to make sense of her life and dreams, but mostly she just gets drunk and lets herself get swept up into hopelessly predictable problems, most of them involving sex. It's literary lasciviousness, although it is occasionally funny. Unfortunately, the story is populated by naive, inconsequential, and unlikeable characters, every one of them (not the least of which our self-absorbed lead) treading water and pointing at the ripples around them as evidence of progress.

Although the themes here are suitably juicy (Lethem is trying to make a point about the creative process itself, the thin line between marketability and genius, the decay of all great ideas into cliche), mostly the book is just a parlor trick, and one you're likely to already know the secret to. For newcomers to Lethem, the book will be an amusing diversion, its love triangles, loving descriptions of music, and even the subplot about a kidnapped kangaroo, but for those who've experienced Lethem before (especially those who've seen what else he can do with kangaroos), it will likely be a niggling reminder that the man is capable of so much more.

I have read and very much admired most of Jonathan Lethem's work. This book made me feel that the whole notion of a rock band is sunsetting, a relic of the late 20th Century, now slipping over the horizon into the gone world of history. Perhaps that was the intent. A brief summary is really all it takes to do the plot justice. An artist starts a public complaint line as a performance event. One Complainer rises above the pack and seduces a young & quirky rocker chick. For a day job, he fabricates slogans, viral word memes that sound like an unholy cross between Barbara Kruger and Erma Bombeck. The rocker chick & her cute friends in their 20's start a band in L.A., have sex with each other, get drunk, have sex with some other people, write quirky songs, play a loft party, and are somewhat willingly exploited, sexually & perhaps financially, by gray ponytailed, hippie capitalist types. Pace CRASS: so wot?

It's a very slightly diverting romp, with some witty dialogue, but the whole notion of a rock band's glamorous, decadent aura of "cool" is made to seem quite...posthumous, somehow. Like, there's not an original gesture they could make within the trope of "rock & roll," it's all been done before. Accordingly, the band quickly implodes after inspiring a brief frisson of exploitative lust, largely among the aforementioned graying ponytails. Really, on its face, this is an insultingly bad book. But to me it's obvious from his other books that Lethem is a kind of genius. So there has to be more to it than that, a lot more. Maybe this whole thing is a refugee from Lethem's id, a suckerpunch smackdown of the whole big stupid rock & roll thing? Or even a deliberate subversion of the tottering mausoleum of late 20th Century rock'n roll culture? A memorial service for cool?

I had read several rave reviews of this book so I had anticipated an exceptional novel. Perhaps it's my age or the fact that I live in a small town in the South, but the characters were not believable, their emotions and personalities were flat and the ending was not satisfying. It was overall a depressing book.

Not quite worthy of hardcover status. A breezy 20-somethings novel that can be read in one long afternoon, it reminds me of a less introspective Douglas Coupland. Young people go through the normal lessons of being young people growing into adulthood. These lessons happen to revolve around a local band, but it could just as easily be the close-knit crew of a Best Buy. The events in your mid-20s can all be corrected, so the drama is somewhat lessened. This book will probably be greatly enjoyed by college students at the beach during summer break of 2007.

As the other reviews noted, the potential film projects might be more interesting and would probably make the characters life-like and frankly, more touching.