I’m
inadvertently sleuthing my way through Lethem’s books. Wandering through the store the other day, I spied this upon the Clearance shelf (my haunt) and had to have it. I hadn’t even heard of the book, to be honest. So, that’s how we’ll preface this.
Here’s a brief review of Jonathan Lethem’s obscure little tome, You Don’t Love Me Yet.
Insecurity and apathy in Los AngelesThe story revolves around Lucinda, a floater in the unkempt toilet of LA. The city itself serves as a skeleton of bad memories, built to trap friends together who’d prefer to disband, but instead dwell in an endless loop of reruns that refuse to go off the air.
Lucinda’s the bassist for a band, who’s name we don’t know yet, ’til nearly the end of the book. In fact, they never came up with a name; a radio DJ named Fancher Autumnbreast just slapped it on them, dubbing them “Monster Eyes” after their hit single, played twice at a show billed as a silent “headphone party”.
Lucinda is languid, quippy, euphoric, and completely, 100 percent go-with-the-flow. Except when she can’t take a hint as to when it’s actually time to go.
The poor thing drinks her way through life and expects people to clean up her messes. And they do! The dears.
Vintage ContemporariesPeriphery characters shine in You Don’t Love Me Yet. In the beginning of the story, we see Lucinda taking up part-time residence as an erstwhile secretary for a complaint line which is not supposed to exist. Her ex, Falmouth, tends to set up these nonevents wherein he makes a living purely through hype and kitschy flyers about town. (Lethem loves him some flyers, don’t he?)
This is where Lucinda meets the Complainer. His real name is Carl Vogelsong (Birdkiller in German). This guy manages to ensnare her, the flighty little robin that she is, in his trap of hipster guile. Carl comes up with a catchy phrase every few months or so and somehow it ends up on bumper stickers, T-shirts, and coffee mugs. This affords him a loft, all the wine he can drink, and apparently all the women he can handle. He doesn’t drive a car and he doesn’t use his rotary-dial phone, except to call Lucinda at work… until he stops calling.
This always happen after you have sex with someone, right? He gives her instant orgasms and he thinks nothing of her. She’s a hole to sink time into. Their relationship represents a bubble-like microcosm where booze, music, art, and love all intertwine to produce everything and nothing. Lucinda lives in a haze of creativity with this zeitgeist for a couple of weeks, until she realizes she belongs with the guy who has been there all along: Matthew, the singer in the band. (*This would be a spoiler, I’m guessing.*)
What is love?Matthew and Lucinda have been on-again-off-again lovers for the past two years or so. The way she describes him, he’s a model Californian: he sings in a band, he subsists on air and the occasional clump of cauliflower, and he’s a die-hard animal lover. Matthew even manages to abscond with the foul form of a kangaroo, Shelf the Flyer (this should’ve been the name of the band, in my opinion), he keeps in his bathtub until such a time when he gives up the Ghost of Activism Past and surrenders the lass back into the clutches of the zoo where he apparently still keeps a cubicle, because the company doesn’t want to admit their flaws in security and they’d rather not see any press on this.
So Lucinda, in her stupor, fucks around and screws Carl and screws Bedwin (the guitarist), and eventually comes back to Matthew. Aw, true wuv. Hence the title, You Don’t Love Me Yet. When it comes down to it, it takes time to understand the word itself, doesn’t it? They were perfect all along. They just needed to see their little bouts of morose insanity through to their conclusions, then they could comfortably come together in fry-stealing bliss.
You Don’t Love Me Yet is packed full of all the amazing little phrases that make Jonathan Lethem’s work so entertaining. He wakes you up in the middle of a sentence, dragging you back into unreality with such metaphors as, “… his face bore the expression of a woken duck,” and “… his telephone rang, a whirr or chortle you’d produce by great effort with a hand-cranked eggbeater.” He really puts you in there, slaps you in the face and says hey, this is what life feels like. You’re there, in LA, with these fruitcakes, living the life of a philandering, music-making machine. It’s an escapist’s romp into a world where the sun is always shining, the scotch flows like Niagara, and your friends never leave you… until you grow tired of them.
It’s a diamond in the rough, this one, a cracked and foul-colored jewel. I’m a smidge bit sad I hadn’t picked it up sooner (the 17-year old me would’ve loved the fuck out of it). Despite the reviews on Goodreads, give the guy some credit. He’s creating worlds here, and we readers just slobber them up like pigs at the trough of literary proliferation. Say grace and say thanks for another gem from Jonathan Lethem.
Featured image via a YouTube video on kangaroo fights by the BBC
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