Failed fling

>> Wild sex scenes and a page-turning
plot don’t seduce in Jonathan Lethem’s
latest, You Don’t Love Me Yet

by JULIET WATERS

You Don’t Love Me Yet, the first novel released by Jonathan Lethem since his semi-autobiographical tour de force, The Fortress of Solitude, is so relatively lame that it seems almost deliberate. You have to wonder about such a disappointing follow-up from a writer who recently released a collection of essays titled The Disappointment Artist. Maybe the pressure of being an important writer got to him. I keep picturing Lethem smiling a secret smile every time he reads another cranky review, and every time he thinks about all those obsessive fans who may finally stop writing him. If failure is your goal, a wise New Yorker once wrote, you can’t fail.

That said, if you head into this novel knowing ahead of time that you’ll be disappointed, you might find it surprisingly likeable. Just don’t let yourself be seduced by a page-turning plot, smart dialogue, weirdly erotic sex scenes, and lovely images that seem to bubble out of paragraphs of shallow self-conscious sludge. The Fortress of Solitude is a novel worth loving, You Don’t Love Me Yet is at best a fuckbuddy.

Lethem makes this clear in the first paragraph of a chapter that opens with an ending. In a time that could be the ’80s, the ’90s or the here and now, Lucinda Hoekke, an aspiring L.A. bassist and Matthew Plangent, her lead singer, have decided to break up, again, for sure. They meet in an art museum where they “felt certain they wouldn’t be tempted to do more than talk.”

Everything about this chapter feels contrived, not just their names and the quirky, awkward break-up sex they have on miniature furniture in one of the museum’s installation pieces. Still, there are interesting times ahead. Lucinda has just quit her job at Coffee Chairs and Matthew is about to kidnap a kangaroo from the L.A. zoo where he works as a veterinary nurse. Lucinda is now working for a conceptual artist who has set up a faux complaints line. Soon she’ll start having vaguely masochistic sex with one of her regular “complainers,” while Matthew hides the kangaroo in his bathroom, and the band starts to make it big. As plots go, it’s like watching a mixed tape of 9 1/2 Weeks spliced with stray episodes of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo and early Entourage.

Lucinda’s complainer, Carl, turns out to be a master of “itchy phrases” conceptual hooks, t-shirt slogans like “All Thinking Is Wishful” and “NOBODY KNOWS I’M SUICIDAL.” Before they meet in person, Lucinda starts using some of Carl’s phrases to inspire the band’s blocked songwriter, Bedwin. Within a week, they have four new songs that sound like they’ve been stolen from the secret vault of unreleased tracks by Guided By Voices: “Dirty Yellow Chair,” “Nostalgia Vu,” “Astronaut Food” and “Secret From Yourself.”

Carl finds out, but fortunately doesn’t want a financial stake. He wants to join the band, as the keyboard player. Problem is, he’s old and kind of fat, and the incongruous result is something like Mickey Rourke in the role of Shirley Partridge. This could be fun if Lethem’s mind wasn’t so intractably made for deeper stuff. He can’t help dipping into meditations on love and art that would sound pretentious coming from any other writer. From Lethem, they merely sound dumbed down, like he’s been borrowing anti-depressants from Douglas Coupland.

There’s nice stuff in here, the boy can’t help it. But in the end, it just doesn’t connect. If there’s a bright side, maybe a failed novel is just what Lethem needs. Something that will put his tendency to collage instead of write back in the juvenilia drawer where it belongs. Maybe this is more like a last failed fling before he gets down to the hard work of being the serious writer he is.

You Don’t Love Me Yet by
Jonathan Lethem, Doubleday, hc, 224pp, $30