Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet
A few weeks ago I finished Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet. Lethem’s the author of one of my favorite books, Motherless Brooklyn.
Where Motherless Brooklyn is a Tourettic thug-narrated detective story and is quite a serious and heavy story, You Don’t Love Me Yet is a farcical look at an LA art scene, an indie band and the relationships within and without the band.
It’s a quick and quite a fun read though it wasn’t genius-level work, like Motherless Brooklyn. I enjoyed it overall. One thing I sometimes have trouble with farces, and this is sort of a fundamental quality of the genre, is that the characters are difficult to relate to because they’re often absurd.
The music sections of the book are definitely written in a way that is convincing; either Lethem knows the small band music biz or he fakes it pretty well.
I found myself thinking while reading about what the band would sound like, trying to reconstruct the songs in my head as they were described. I don’t think I would like the band, they seem too angular with too little melody in the vocals. Maybe that’s just how I’d hear it at least.
It’s available at amazon
