Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Jonathan Lethem wrote that. Or, rather, he admits to lifting it from Mary Shelley’s introduction to “Frankenstein” for an essay that appeared in last month’s Harper’s titled “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Lethem posits there, in a woven text of sampled ideas and stolen words, that all art comes from borrowed material.
This admission, from one of the most inventive authors working today, comes on the heels of his new comic novel, “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” in which plagiarism is the central narrative force.
Lucinda Hoekke is not just the bass player. She is a life force, a thundering strand of bottom-heavy soul, who will set the beat for the lives of her bandmates, an ungrounded cast of misguided creative geniuses about to hit it big in Los Angeles. And it’s really too bad for them, because she is going to screw this up just like she does everything else.
Lucinda’s on-again, dumped- again boyfriend, Matthew, is the emaciated pretty-boy frontman of the quartet who covertly liberates a kangaroo from the zoo where he works because the animal is dying from ennui. Bedwin, the hermited songwriter of this yet unnamed rock group, has writer’s block and can barely remember to feed himself. Denise, their drummer, works at No Shame, a masturbation boutique.
Lucinda spends her days answering phones at the Complaint Line, an art installation that pretends to log the city’s gripes, where she is seduced by the poetic complaints of a frequent caller. When the complainer discovers Lucinda has appropriated his words as the lyrics for the band’s newest and best songs, he insists on joining and ruining the band.
From there Lethem embarks on a hilarious romp in which ideas of sex, love, art and intellectual property are turned on end. Even where minor narrative elements falter, Lethem’s characters and ideas are made whole with his astonishing gift of language. He plays with it in ways no one else can. His words dance, describing music with the chaotic precision of rock itself. The man is a magician with prose; but that’s nothing new, that’s just Jonathan Lethem.
A romantic comedy
The real news is that with “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” Lethem has written what is essentially a romantic comedy. No joke.
Lethem initially made his mark writing some of the most depressing and inventive dystopian modern science fiction. His masterwork, “Fortress of Solitude,” a semi-autobiographical tome concerning the downfall of two boyhood friends, is as exciting in capturing fully realized lives with transcendent prose as it is depressing and long. Brilliant, though. The critically acclaimed “Motherless Brooklyn” is a marvel of literary invention in which Lethem channeled and reshaped the language through a tourrettic orphan.
Though Lethem has in previous works proved his ability to turn a biting eye on the absurd for comic moments, this is the silliest of his novels. Far from the breathtaking loss and pain in “Fortress of Solitude” lies Lethem’s Los Angeles.
This novel starts in a museum full of silly things, and is itself a gallery of the absurd where the author gets to have too much fun with his prodigious talent. The band’s big break is at a party meant to be a performance art piece where they are intended to play inaudibly. Lethem repeatedly pokes fun at those who take art and themselves too seriously. He reduces talk of universal truths between his characters to Rolling Stones trivia – though talk of criteria determining the best Stones album is no idle matter, in my opinion.
He gives Lucinda a limited decision-making power that requires the aided will of a rotating billboard for a podiatrist’s office. Happy foot, yes. Sick foot, no. But there is also downfall associated with taking creation, and indeed the physical act of procreation, too lightly – though the laughable consequences wouldn’t make the final cut of any after-school special.
What to crib from?
Most interestingly, Lethem plays the idea of plagiarism to a satirical end in which the genesis of the ideas that set this narrative moving is still left for debate. Would there have been an almost-hit song without the complainer’s words? Would there have been a complainer without the Complaint Line installation? Would there be a “You Don’t Love Me Yet” without the whole of art, music and literature that came before it? What of this fantastically original work was lifted, parsed and remixed from bits of art history and popular culture?
Some nimble-minded researcher, safely cloistered in the farthest- flung regions of the blogosphere will undoubtedly excavate and annotate the text for us, charging the author with obscure bits of love and theft, which he may or may not have committed consciously. But this book bares all the markings of a Lethem original, and this uproarious farce could only have come from the mind of one man. Regardless of what he would say about it.
Sean Cronin is a Denver-based freelance writer.
