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A disappointment from the usually reliable Lethem
“A disappointment from the usually reliable Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet features all the quality prose you'd expect, but lacks the strong characters and plots I've come to love from him. You Don't Love Me Yet feels a lot like it should be from the Lethem era of Gun, with Occasional Music, with its piles of quirks and satirical look at the world around us. But whereas Gun's quirks were only the beginning, hooking the reader with an intriguing mystery and an unexpectedly powerful finale, You Don't Love Me Yet ends up feeling like the quirk and satire is all the depth there is. There are some marvelous and wonderful scenes - the description of the first perception's of a band's debut is fantastic - but in general, it all feels a little empty and pointless, filled with unengaging characters, toothless satire, and a story that feels vague to the point of formlessness. I love Lethem's work, by and large, but his last couple of novels have left me a little disappointed; here's hoping he returns to the genius of his early work soon.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-08-24. -
2 of 2 members found this review helpful.
Overwritten, pretensious and bad
“I may have chosen the wrong book by this author, but I may never find out for sure. This book was pretty bad, as a matter of fact I am not sure that I have ever read a worse book. The plot and the characters could not have been more shallow or meaningless. It serves as a slice of life story that covers a few months in the lives of people who I am glad do not really exist. There were some interesting moments and ideas but all in all not really worth reading. At least it was a fast read since it was so short on detail or development. Ick.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-05-12. -
disappointing work from one of my favorite new writers.
“This book starts with all the promise in the world; a great setup, great characters, terrific dialog. It picks up speed from there, building into an intensely romantic, erotic liason between two characters (a scene that that filled me with writer's jealousy, because it was so incredibly well done).
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-05-01.
And then it goes - absolutely nowhere. Lethem seems to want to write several novels here; one skewering the L.A. art scene, one about young, hip band on the verge of a breakout, one a funny doomed romance between a jaded, damaged older man and a wide-eyed hipster girl. These stories all might have made good-to-great short stories, or even two decent short novels, but instead, he grafts them together, failing each and producing a novel that's completely unsatisfying.
Lethem is a somewhat difficult writer. I say that because his books are always intelligent, slightly bizarre, and feature peculiar plots and un-satifying endings. I think these endings are a stylistic choice, not a failing; sometimes it works (Gun, with Occasional Music, Motherless Brooklyn), sometimes it does not (As she climbed across the table, Girl in Landscape). But with each of these books, the whole works and the endings fit; the product as a whole is good, sometimes great.
Here, it felt as if the writer were at a loss for what to do with these fantastic characters. It felt like one of those tacked on endings you get in films, when the end didn't test well and the studio requests a re-shoot. Suddenly instead of tragedy or artful ambiguity, you'll get improbably happy faces. The end of this book felt irrelevant and contrived.
The reason I find this so deeply disappointing is that Lethem is so very good; the parts of this novel that worked are as good as anything he's done (I'm not kidding, I had to re-read the hotel room scene three times just to figure out how he got it so completely right). But these terrific parts are wasted in a whole that never comes together in any way. ” -
This Book Does What It Portrays
“What you derive from reading this book will depend on why (some might prefer to say 'how') you read it. The plot is deceptively simple, carried as with other of Lethem's writing by his careful description of sensible details. Surroundings, bodies, self-sensations--all are provided so the reader easily imagines being in the story with the characters. Lethem's careful noting of "meaningless" details is one of the things that gives his writing an offbeat quality, and for the most part, it is agreeable.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-04-10.
The main character is a 29-year-old woman in a garage band, and the plot is largely constructed of her flickering attempts to find love/sex/closeness with someone. The someones change several times through the course of the story, and with varying results. There are other sub-themes, but this is the central one flowing throughout the story.
One of the first and most important structures in the story is the call-in Complaint center where she works for a time. Her own ambivalence and oscillation between independence/intimacy is mirrored in the situation of her taking calls from complete strangers, asking them questions and making notes. This process unsurprisingly affects her, and she takes the professionally inappropriate step of speaking in a personal way with a man who she later meets.
None of this captures the process of the book, which I predict will affect *you*, according to how you identify with her and with any of the other array of characters in the book (mostly, her band mates). The book is a processional of feeling "tests" peeling back to reveal a new, next layer, and not always with satisfying results.
Good luck.
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1 of 1 members found this review helpful.
The Justified Complainer
“The usually intriguing Jonathan Lethem falters with this slow-moving, unremarkable, and disappointing novel - for some reason delving into a genre that is not his forte and which has already been done to death by lesser writers. The jacket blurb will have you believe the book is a send-up of romantic comedies with quirky characters. But if this is supposed to be a send-up, Lethem is only satirizing himself, delivering a story that became the very same type of genre tripe that he was probably trying to skewer.
An amazon user wrote this on 2008-11-20.
The story is not romantic or comedic, and the characters are more incongruous than quirky. The plotting is slow and directionless, focused on messy but utterly unexceptional love lives that could be concocted by any writer of teen chick lit. With the exception of an inconsequential subplot about one of the characters kidnapping a supposedly depressed kangaroo, Lethem has dropped his knack for the insightfully surreal in favor of stereotypical angst and ennui among artsy hipsters. If Lethem meant to shed light on this scene, he's about a decade and a half behind schedule, with his characters exhibiting the "...whatever..." style of forced self-irony and detached cynicism that was fashionable for a few minutes back in the grunge era. Even Lethem's usually vibrant prose falls into the same malformed false subversion displayed by his characters - for example, "a kind of on-the-spot reconstruction of this music's sense in the first place." Granted, there are a few surprise twists near the end of the story, but plodding melodrama swamps any empathy the reader may feel for the characters.
Lethem is capable of far more than this. Perhaps this utterly unaccomplished novel is the result of bad advice from an agent telling Lethem to go mainstream. Hopefully he'll soon return to his established strengths and leave this misstep behind him. [~doomsdayer520~]”
