Jonathan's Letham's most recent novel, "You Don't Love Me Yet," is nothing if not spunky. At the nucleus, there is a band comprised of four members with a strange array of day jobs; one is a zoo employee with particular concerns regarding the happiness of a kangaroo named Shelf, another works at a masturbation boutique called No Shame. The book begins with two of the band's members deciding to end their recurring romance for good. To reveal that this resolution leads to a steamy encounter in a friend's art installment is only a taste of the mischief that Letham's youthful protagonists enjoy. As the reader, if you do not identify with any of these characters, you will likely find that they do many of the things you wish you could, enacting visions of a rock star lifestyle.
Lucinda's recent emphatic split from Michael leads her to work as a receptionist for a complaint hotline. She is the band's bassist, reckless in her drinking and her interactions with men to a childish degree. It is partly this willful quality that leads her directly from Michael's arms into the hotel bed of a man she knows only from the brilliant complaints that he pours into her ear through the telephone. Eventually repercussions arise, but Lucinda hardly feels their weight as she is protected by her ability to float, often on a sea of booze, from one circumstance to the next.
The band is far from a secondary aspect of the plot. On the verge of breaking into the L.A. music scene, it seems the quartet needs nothing more than inspiration to boost them to the next level. The lyrics provided by Lucinda's anonymous complainer provide the band's direction. In the complainer's expressive anecdotes about his numerous sexual encounters lie the tools capable of leveling Bedwin's, the band's reclusive songwriter's, writer's block. The downfall of the band becomes inevitable, however, when the complainer inserts his presence into their foursome. Impulsive as he is eloquent, the fate of the quartet lies directly in the path of his whim and it is a brief moment before the entire enterprise is ruptured.
The lyrics that Letham writes are playful and ironic, but wind up as both poignant and haunting. As they are all pirated from the complainer's archives of sexcapades, they are consistently titillating and just as frequently paired with dissatisfaction. It is not hard to believe that when set to music, these sentiments come alive. They are undeniably catchy because one reads them and exclaims, "This is about me!" One particularly convincing term arises in an early conversation between the complainer and Lucinda. He speaks, or complains, about people who figure in one's life as "astronaut food." The definition is so universally familiar and applicable that it has since found its way onto urbandictionary.com.
Letham successfully taps into the pool of "adults" who continue to operate with the unthinking impulsiveness of hormonal teenagers. Despite technicalities that dictate graduation from the confusion of teenage years, Letham exhibits it in its strange glory in these music, love, and liquor-drenched pages.