Low Fidelity
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Has any writer ever adequately explained what happens when a rock band comes together and finds its voice?
The sound was sprung, uncanny, preverbal, the bass and drum the rudiment of life itself, argument and taunt, and each turn of the figure a kiss-off until the cluster of notes began again. … The words were freighted with a righteousness and panic each player felt as a confession. A voicing they couldn’t have sanctioned alone, only collectively.
Jonathan Lethem’s words typify an ambitious tradition in rockwriting that emphasizes tension and alludes to an almost holy sense of revelation.
Taken from an early scene in Mr. Lethem’s new novel, “You Don’t Love Me Yet” (Doubleday. 224 pages. $24.95), the passage of musical description above expresses something broader about the book’s message. A tepid satire, having more in common with Mr. Lethem’s disappointing novella “This Shape We’re In” (2000) than with “Motherless Brooklyn” (1999) or “The Fortress of Solitude” (2003), this new book nonetheless ventures complex social commentary.
First, moving from his habitual Brooklyn to Los Angeles, Mr. Lethem stakes out a Californian daze, unserious but confidently sensual. The city is washed-out and mostly empty, populated by a few allegorical hipsters. Lucinda, a coffee clerk turned gallery attendant, has broken up with Matthew, her band’s lanky lead-singer, who looks “like a model on a billboard advertisement for vegetarian cigarettes.” Matthew’s indie rock helplessness pales before that of Bedwin, the band’s songwriter, a scrawny character who likes Fritz Lang. Denise is the drummer with a heart of gold. Falmouth, an artist, understands critical theory but not rock. Jules, a promoter, understands neither.
Mr. Lethem’s satirical daggers are short, and don’t go beyond these territorial delineations. A more topical satirist might get down and dirty with L.A. culture; Mr. Lethem contents himself with surface jokes, training his real power not on indie rock but on the world of ideas.
These are represented in Carl, “the complainer,” a white-haired entrepreneur whose loft becomes the band’s rehearsal space after Carl seduces Lucinda via an arty complaint line. Carl makes his money by inventing deep thoughts for T-shirts and bumper stickers: “Nobody Knows I’m Suicidal,” or “You Can’t Be Deep Without a Surface,” or “Pour Love on the Broken Places” — the last of which, with its maudlin simplicity, sounds more like something Matthew or Bedwin would invent. Mr. Lethem doesn’t try to be pitch-perfect in this novel; he lets his satirical content slop across generation gaps.
As Carl’s slogans begin to find their way into the band’s songs, and as he begins to find his way into Lucinda’s pants, the conflict in Mr. Lethem’s plot turns miasmic: Who will influence whom, where does cause end and effect begin? The band’s shot at fame looks at once like a cosmic coincidence, a mob project, and a textbook case of myspace synergy. Carl’s ideas — “itchy phrases,” he calls them — act like Richard Dawkins’s “memes,” units of information that move through society like a virus.
As a metaphor, viral marketing serves well enough for a critique of the loft culture that Mr. Lethem has in his cross hairs, but he goes further. As Lucinda falls in love with Carl, the idea of a meme — of catchiness — becomes indistinguishable from the idea of desire. And as the band relaxes, and releases “a voicing they couldn’t have sanctioned alone, only collectively,” an old-fashioned ethic of free, spontaneous expression finds its way into the branching, networked sociability embodied by the young band.
It is another baby boomer like Carl, a legendary discjockey named Autumnbreast, who puts the kibosh on the now-intergenerational band. Autumnbreast once consoled Marianne Faithful, and he has no problem calling Carl a “goof” to his face. It is the band’s youthful sexual swing, after all, that matters. Its radio appearance goes badly. Was it gone, what they had? “It’s so gone, buttermilk, it’s like it was never there,” explains Autumnbreast.
Mr. Lethem leaves his characters gently disbanded, their idea-receptors presumably chastened. Whether their music was an uncanny revelation or a viral meme, Mr. Lethem suggests it was a fragile thing. “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” though it coruscates with hangovers and sex, is actually a novel about chancy success in a world of ideas. Whether rock is a world of ideas or a world of gut feeling may be a moot point, Mr. Lethem implies, when our ideas are understood as overwhelming organic chain reactions.
