You Don’t Love Me Yet Is A Good Book

Or why you should read You Don’t Love Me Yet

by Jonathan Lethem

You Don’t Love Me Yet is a novel about a nameless band struggling in obscurity to find their breakthrough success. The band is made of Matthew, a charismatic and handsome singer who is deeply upset about a sick kangaroo at the zoo her works at, Denise, a practical, professional drummer who works in an LA sex shop, Bedwin, a talented writer and musician with a fragile temperament, and Lucinda Hoekke, a passionate bassist looking for a day job. In an effort to make a living Lucinda takes a job working in her friends art piece as a phone operator listening to strangers complaints. Lucinda finds herself ensnared by the complexity of one callers compelling complaints and bringing them to her band, uses them to craft incredible new songs. But now, finally on the edge of success, Lucinda finds herself infatuated with her special Complainer who knows whats she’s done and wants in.

You Don’t Love Me Yet is a pretty weird, fun, and engrossing read. It has a wonderfully playful tone and weird aesthetic that vacillates between inane humour and a kind of precious, cerebral depth that makes for a compelling read. It’s a novel made out of a bassline, the energy that exists between the gleeful vulgarity of an over-the-top guitar solo and the mechanical discipline of a drummers craft. It’s a bit like an erection, all bloated and hard and eager, a finel honed sex machine developed by millennia of evolution, but also, you know, a hilarious rubbery prong. It’s the kind of novel that makes a person want to write sentences like that.

You don’t love Me Yet is also a novel with some thematic heavy lifting going on. It’s a bit nebulous, but if I had to take a stab at it, I’d say it’s a novel about creativity and being an artist. In some ways, I think you could argue that the nameless band in the novel is a stand in for the facets of an artist. Bedwin is the brilliant, broken introvert who represents the alien talent that makes art happen. Denise is the dedicated work ethic that is needed to actually make art. Matthew is the charismatic sense of cool needed to be the face of artwork. Lucinda is the wildcard sense of perverse passion that is maybe the embodiement of the “midnight disease” LINKLINKLINK at the heart of a lot of talent. The Complainer is maybe a sense of greed or commercial success that drives and weighs on the creative process. If viewed from this lens, You Don’t Love Me Yet is a testament about the triumph and conflict that exists between these separate creative forces in every collaborative or individual artist. Or at least, that’s my book club take.

I would recommend this book to anyone who likes genre writing but also has a cautious curiosity about literary fiction. You Don’t Love Me Yet has the sense of fun and self-awareness that good genre writing displays, but is also just pretentious and precious enough to work as a pretty nifty feat of literary fiction. I find a lot of straight literary fiction kind of stuffy or much too invested in its own cleverness to be particularly entertaining, but this novel walks a careful line which made it a genuinely fun book to read that was also a smart little Work Of Art Writing. I quite enjoyed it.

Previously:

As She Climbed Across The Table

Motherless Brooklyn
Gun, With Occasional Music

The Fortress Of Solitude Is A Good Book

Or why you should read The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem.

I try to go into novels with very few expectations beyond some familiarity with the authors track record and some basic idea about what the plot will be about. Like, I have a sense what a thriller novel by a favourite author who writes thrillers or an idea of what the Sci-fi sequel of another favourite author might be like. This sense of what to expect gives me some idea of whether I will enjoy the novel, whether its the right choice for a particular week, and let's me gear up for the necessary mode of reading. (A silly Fantasy romp needs a far different mental process than Gravity's Rainbow and delivers a radically different reading experience.) My point here is that I usually try to have some idea of whether I want a reading meal before I order it.

I was grossly mistaken about what kind of book The Fortress of Solitude is.

For some reason that I can't quite explain, I thought that Fortress would be vaguely genre and kind of existentially whimsical. Maybe kind of a bittersweet coming of age story that centres around comic books or some sort of supernatural experience. I knew race, the American black-white divide would be important, but figured it would be observed through the lens of Superheroics. I thought it would be kind of like a Silver-to-Bronze Age version of the excellent The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, since Jonathan Lethem clearly has the genre love, geekiness, and sheer prose writing chops to realize such a book.

This is not what The Fortress of Solitude is at all!

Instead The Fortress of Solitude is a novel about the experience of isolation.

The early sections of the depict the childhood of Dylan Edbus, a young white boy growing up in a very black neightbourhood of Brooklyn in the 1970s. The novel beautifully recreates his young life, the size and enormity of street games with the local kids, the challenges of fitting into a racially different neighbourhood, the tragedy of his broken family, and what happens when he strikes up an unexpected friendship with Mingus Rude, a black boy from another broken home, and they discover a magic ring that lets them fly. The latter part of the book deals with a grown up Dylan as he tries to come to terms with an adult life irrevocably marred by his childhood experiences. From a purely narrative perspective it is a powerful and beautiful character story and a vivid depiction of a certain moment in American history.

The Fortress of Solitude really shines thematically. The novel plays with the difference between the epic scale of childhood and contrasts it with the jaded perspective of adults in a way I found really resonated with my own experience. Fortress also examines the difference between the Black and White experience in America in a really visceral and empathetic way. The book delves into the grand debate between the power of flight, the need to be seen and loved and virtuous, and the power of invisibility, that base desire to be anonymous and exempt and amoral. Most of all though, the novel examines isolation and solitude imposed by obsession or wanderlust or race or self-imposed myopia. It's a story element that I think any introvert can really relate to. For all of the story, it is these cavernous depths to the book that I found to be the most captivating.

So yeah, The Fortress of Solitude isn't a genre-friendly coming of age story and is instead a deeply thoughtful book about isolation, race, and gradually maturing views on life. It wasn't what I was expecting, but was much more satisfying.

I would recommend this book to anyone looking for something substantial to read. This is a brick of prose and while it is certainly geek friendly, making many references to geek media, it isn't a fun genre novel. Instead The Fortress of Solitude is a serious work of literary fiction, and if you want to read a really great, nerd-accessible literary novel I can think of few better to choose from. And really, if you are a socially incompetent introvert, this book has depths for you to plunge into. It's really worth the investment of effort and time.

Post by Michael Bround

As She Climbed Across The Table Is A Good Book

Or why you should read As She Climbed Across The Table
by Jonathan Lethem

In my day job I'm doing a PhD in Cardiac Cell Biology in an academic research lab. I spend my days devising ways to figure out how things work in biological systems that are endlessly complex and completely indifferent to my efforts. Science is inscrutable, with every discover creating more questions in this endless singularity of searching. Research is brutal, filled with mistakes and failed experiments. It's the kind of career that rewards obsession and can absorb you completely if you aren't careful. And so managing a healthy work life balance, making sure I spend enough time working on my relationships is a central challenge of my adult life.

So when I read As She Climbed Across The Table it cut me like a knife.

As She Climbed Across The Table tells a story of academic obsession and unrequited love. In the novel Philip Engstrand, an anthropologist who studies other researchers, is madly in love with Dr. Alice Coombs, a partical physicist. When an experiment meant to create a new universe goes awry and stabilizes as a mass-less, energy-less point of absorption, Alice becomes obsessed. This hungry absence, this Lack, is more than just a physical phenomenon and begins to display preference in what it consumes. Lack will absorb some things but not others, and Alice finds this fact irresistible. Philip begins to suspect that Alice is in love with the Lack and that he is losing her to this point of nothingness. But Philip is in love, and so he will do whatever it takes to win her back.

So you can see why this novel guts me. Its portrayal of research as an act of unrequited love bestowed on an unfeeling nothingness at the expense of human relationships is biting. The novel's depiction of loving an obsessed Scientist as being a jilted lover chasing another kind of absence is a cautionary tale. And the exploration of unrequited love as an obsession with an unfeeling absence that you want to pour yourself into completely is beautifully, uncomfortably spot on. As She Climbed Across The Table is just spectacularly engrossing.

I would recommend this book to virtually any reader. I'm not sure this novel will resonate with everyone at the same frequency, since a lot of what cut me so deeply was so particular to my experience. But being crushed by unrequited love is a pretty universal experience, right? And that aspect of this novel alone is beautiful and scary and a little funny and should capture any reader. So if you are a Scientist with a loved one or someone who has had their affections ignored, than As She Climbed Across The Table is a book you should read.

Post by Michael Bround

Previously:
Motherless Brooklyn
Gun, With Occasional Music

Gun, With Occasional Music Is A Good Book

Or why you should read Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem

Gun, With Occasional Music is a noirey, gonzo Sci-fi mystery. It follows hardboiled private inquistor Conrad Metcalf in a future where questions are forbidden by law, perception altering drugs are over the counter, and where sentient animals and prematurely intelligent babies are up to no good. It is against this background that Orton Angwine, a desperate man all out of karma, approaches Metcalf desperate for help, convinced he is being framed for the murder of a well known urologist. Metcalf, unable to help himself, takes the case and finds himself in a world of trouble. The dead doctor's wife wants things left alone, the inquisitors want the case buried, and a gun-toting kangaroo tough wants Metcalf to just fuck off. But Metcalf is an inquisitive guy, and he wants to get to the bottom of it,

Gun, With Occasional Music is, more than anything, a really fun book. It dives into the swagger and smarm of pulp detective novels with a vengeance and creates a weird and uncouth Sci-fi world where a gun-toting kangaroo working for a mafia kingpin makes narrative sense. Which isn't to imply that this a novel of style without substance: the central mystery of Gun, With Occasional Music is really convoluted and smart and the Science Fiction elements, as wild as they are, circle some pretty hefty ideas about authority and appeasing the masses. Gun, With Occasional Music also wears its literary influences pretty openly. I read Chandler's The Long Goodbye immediately before Gun, and PDK's The Man In The High Tower a week or so before, so it was impossible for me to ignore the influence of both these authors on the novel, which made for an interesting experience. Seriously, Gun, With Occasional Music is a really fun book.

I would recommend Gun, With Occasional Music to any fan of Sci-fi who is curious about Pulp Detective stories or any Mystery Fiction readers tentatively interested in Sci-fi. It seems like a great gateway book. Gun is also a book that I think would make a great vacation novel: it's fun, an exciting page turner, and short enough to be enjoyed entirely on an airplane ride or casually on a beach. Even if you aren't a genre curious sort or jetting off on a beach trip, Gun is a really clever, fun novel that I think you would probably enjoy, so give it a try.

Motherless Brooklyn Is A Good Book

Or why you should read Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

Motherless Brooklyn is a pulpy detective set in modern-day-ish New York City. The novel focuses on Lionel Essrog, one of a group of orphans taken in by the charismatic Frank Minna. Lionel, along with fellow former denizens of St. Vincent's Home for Boys: Tony, Danny, and Gilbert, have grown to be Minna's men, hardboiled detective thugs working for a small time Brooklyn hustler. But for Lionel, a man who suffers from the vulgar and elaborate tics of a pretty extreme case of Tourette's syndrome, Minna and his men are the only home he has ever known. A home that in Motherless Brooklyn is thrown into disarray when Frank Minna is murdered. 

Part of what makes Motherless Brooklyn such am engrossing read is just how incongruous the whole thing is. The idea of a hardboiled pulp detective, normally a controlled and taciturn archetype, being afflicted with a compulsive mental disorder that makes him bark, randomly utter linguistic nonsense, and generally act without tact or restraint is bizarre genius. Then setting this weird pulp detective tale, filled with characters straight out of the 1940s, in the very polished world of modern New York City adds even more absurdity to the mix. And then steering this twitchy, weird literary orphan into a plot that involves a Zendo, a school of Zen Buddhism involved in Minna's murder, takes it to this place of truly platonic ideal levels of surreal. 

Paired with the zany sense of madness in Motherless Brooklyn is a beating heart of tragedy. Lionel Essrog is a pretty sad figure: for all of his detective acumen, smarts, and general likability, he is indelibly marked and isolated by his mental illness. Tourette's is a very misunderstood and brutal disease. A student in my undergraduate faculty had a Tourettic tic which caused him to incessantly hoot. And seeing how his tic, which in the grand scheme of things was pretty minor, marked him and alienated him from most of his classmates has always stuck with me. The guy was clearly quite smart, he went on to do graduate studies, I think, in a pretty good Botany department, but among our peers he will probably be remembered more as that guy who hooted than as a bosom student comrade or intellectually elite colleague. The way Motherless Brooklyn takes us inside the mind of someone with Tourette's and explores the everyday social cost of the condition really hammers home the challenges of the disease and the value of the afflicted. This is a novel that satisfies Fiction's mandate to operate as an empathy machine. 

I would recommend Motherless Brooklyn to just about anyone. It's pulpy genre heart and mystery keeps the story moving, while the sheer incongruous madness and tragic human soul of the book make it unique and compelling. Motherless Brooklyn is very much a novel that could operate as straightforward page turner as well as a piece of moving literary fiction. It is well worth checking out.