Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #196599 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Observer
'Cracking dialogue, hipster chic, LA heat, lust, ambition and rapidly congealing fast-food, makes for good summer reading.'

Financial Times
'Plays charmingly with aesthetic ideas of superficiality and depth ... brims with Lethem's stylish prose and arresting images.'

Synopsis
Lucinda works in an art installation called The Complaint Line, listening to anonymous callers air their random grievances. And one day, she falls desperately in love with a regular caller. She also plays bass in a struggling band whose lyricist, Bedwin, is suffering from writer's block, and whose lead singer, Matthew, has kidnapped a kangaroo from the local zoo to save it from ennui. When Lucinda 'suggests' some of 'The Complainer's' philosophical musings to Bedwin he transforms them into brilliant songs and the band gets its big break - an invitation to appear on LA's premier alternative radio show. The only problem is 'The Complainer'. He insists on joining the band - with disasterous consequences.

Customer Reviews

This is the premise for Jonathan Lethem's romantic farce You Don't Love Me Yet
Matthew and Lucinda meet at the museum to end their affair...the fact that they almost immediately end up having s3x inside one of the exhibits suggests that as endings go, this isn't likely to be permanent. But they have to split. And they have to remain friends. Anything else would not be good for `the band'.

If you've any friends involved in the local music scene you'll recognise this scenario. OK maybe not the sex in the gallery bit... but definitely the convoluted relationships that go on between people in `the band'. Music is a passionate business, passions run high... but then the passion for the music and for the musicians gets confused and love affairs... well, from what I've seen from the outside, they also get confused. Set in LA, obviously an on-off love affair and a band struggling to make it isn't really going to be enough to hang a story on... so...

Lucinda - in trying to make the split permanent this time quits her job at the coffee shop and goes to work for conceptual artist Falmouth as a "Complaint Line" operator - through which artistic endeavour she meets the new knight-on-charger ("the Complainer") who with the help of Falmouth and a local "Society" party-thrower is about to turn all their lives upside down.

Matthew - bereft without his woman turns to the one other female who really needs him: Shelf - a slightly dysfunctional kangaroo, who may or not fare better for having been kidnapped by Matt and taking up residence in his bathtub.

The pair make the painfully shy and lonely Bedwin - dissecting half-visible signs on the walls of ancient movie sets, while trying to write lyrics - and Denise the drummer - totally sane, practical and normal even if she does work in a porn shop - appear to be boringly average.

What follows is an averagely amusing rendition of the Tales From the City/ Desperate Housewives/ S3x & the City variety. Relationships develop and fall apart. Unlikely partnerships emerge. Friendships soldier on. The band gets its big break... and then a bigger one...(or does it?). Life goes on.

It helps if you like your s3xual encounters to be regular and unerotic. Otherwise they get in the way of a reasonably witty tale of pretension and betrayal. The struggling band reaching for authenticity (but failing to even come up with a name) vying against the manipulators of "style" and "the business". I'm not sure the kangaroo adds a great deal to the plot - but will at least furnish the potential for some seriously funny scripting if the mini-series adaptation materialises.

Two-twenty pages of wide-spaced type makes this a light, easy read. Perfect for a longish train journey, where you can read it at a sitting, smile now & again... and not feel the need to actually take it away with you afterwards. It's quirky and entertaining but any claims the blurb-writers have to compare it with the delights of Austen's Emma are stretching credibility just a tad.

A sad book
I have enjoyed previous books by Jonathan Lethem. Sadly, this book is not a success.

The characters possess no credibility and appear not even to believe in themselves. They do not engage in dialogue, other than to demonstrate how kooky or perceptive they are, speaking always in cod-elegant aphorisms.

The story is weak to the point of non-existence.

I was saddened by this performance because Jonathan Lethem has already written some excellent novels, but for now, he has lost direction.

Read Amnesia Moon instead.