Anguished twentysomethings flail about for real connections in an increasingly virtual world.
Literally and figuratively worlds away from the bustling Brooklyn of Lethem’s best novels, 2007's You Don’t Love Me Yet opens in a blank-walled conceptual art gallery in Los Angeles, a vast, sterile environment prefiguring the emptiness to come. The bass player in an unknown (and unnamed) rock band, Lucinda Hoekke works days in the gallery taking all-purpose complaints from disgruntled Angelenos for an art project, cataloguing, but not assuaging, their discontent.

The boundaries of Lucinda’s assignment begin to fray when she meets (so to speak) the man she calls the Complainer, whose disembodied voice spins explicit but unerotic tales of sexual conquests past. As the Complainer’s calls multiply, Lucinda’s fascination grows; fragments of his monologues are recycled as grist for the band’s creative mill, and she starts breaking the complaint line’s rules, seeking out a flesh-and-blood relationship with a man she knows only as static.

Set, subtly but purposefully, just before the dawn of the internet era (only the most fashion-forward character has email, and there’s nary a cell phone in sight), Lethem’s brief novel tills the familiar turf of anguished twentysomethings flailing about for real connections in an increasingly virtual world. His prose is pungent, particularly when he’s capturing the flavor of the band’s impromptu loft show and the aging A&R men (“unyouthful men in youthful clothes”) who flock to them like gnats.

Reading his own text, Lethem’s voice is steady and clear, aptly replicating the text’s forays into matter-of-fact surrealism. Although much of the novel lies between quotation marks, the author makes little attempt to differentiate between voices, save ending each utterance from the band’s socially retarded guitar genius with a querulous rising note. The book loses steam in its second half, as the relationship between Lucinda and the Complainer becomes physical, their coupling described with the graphic dispassion of a nature film. Lethem turns prose pirouettes as the book falls apart, but he’s skating on thin air.