You Don't Love Me Yet: A Novel [AUDIOBOOK] [UNABRIDGED] (Audio CD)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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?

Fans of Fortress and Motherless Brooklyn may find this novel's levity too drastic a shift, but even though Lethem is having a great time here with wordplay, a motley cast, and Lucinda's sexual meanderings, You Don't Love Me Yet is anything but a simple entertainment. He plays with our notions of art and authorship, enjoying a bit of advanced cribbery himself as he experiments with Shakespearean antics and inexplicable love match-ups. At every turn, Lethem seems to be asking sticky questions: Can anyone create the consummate intersection of dream, desire, and reality that art (and great sex) embodies? Will it last, and should it? Can any one writer capture that moment with a few meager words? If they did, how long would it take for it to be reduced to meaningless slogan? --Heidi Broadhead --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Lethem (Fortress of Solitude; Motherless Brooklyn; etc.) strays from hometown Brooklyn to recount the near-fame experience of a Los Angeles alternative rock band. Its success depends on bass guitarist Lucinda Hoekke, an unwitting femme fatale whose irrational whims torture the artsy Gen-Xers in her orbit. When the novel opens, she's answering phones for a complaint line designed to also function as a "theatrical piece" and is charmed by the eloquent gripes of one serial caller, a professional phrase writer named Carl. (He's responsible for coining "All thinking is wishful," among others.) They embark on a sex-drenched bender that culminates with the band's debut performance—a breakout success. Lucinda is the band's "secret genius," having provided the ideas for the catchiest songs; only she cribbed them from Carl, whose cooperation must be purchased with a token position in the band. Zany disaster ensues in this entertaining but largely insubstantial romantic farce. Lethem tricks out the plot with his usual social wit (music moguls are "unyouthful men in youthful clothes"), but from a writer whose previous books have carved new notches on the literary wall, this measures up as stunted growth. (Mar. 13)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Random House Audio; Unabridged edition (March 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0739314947
• ISBN-13: 978-0739314944
• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,916,406 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Friends, with occasional music, March 18, 2007

By	The Ginger Man - See all my reviews

This review is from: You Don't Love Me Yet: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not so great, but..., April 17, 2007

By	Hank Schwab (Indianapolis, IN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: You Don't Love Me Yet: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I kept waiting for the book to happen, April 1, 2007

By	Stephen Weiner (Maynard, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: You Don't Love Me Yet: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.