You Don’t Love Me Yet
Book by Jonathan Lethem
Faber ₤10.99, 240 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤8.79

Fiction struggles to compete with the glamour and grungy excess of rock music. It may surpass it in its capacity to probe and provoke, but a novel tends not to be as immediately alluring as an album, and a live reading rarely sets the pulse racing the way a high-octane gig will. Novels about bands and about the music business have rarely proved successful.

Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003) demonstrated his flair for riffing about music and popular culture. Now, after the complex sprawl of that fine novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet looks at a comparatively narrow stretch of the music business, zeroing in on an indie band from Los Angeles which finds itself teetering on the brink of success. The band doesn’t have a name, which in hip LA makes it seem cool and edgy, though it might reasonably be taken as a sign of limited imagination; its members are still at the stage where they juggle day jobs and the trials of their unstarry personal lives with the demands of crafting and performing songs.

The territory defined here is unambiguously hip, and there is a great deal that seems contrived - some of it winsome, some of it irritating. The characters have daft names such as Fancher Autumnbreast and Falmouth Strand. The former seems to have been modelled on the legendary West Coast scenester Rodney Bingenheimer, and it’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that Lethem’s may be to some degree a roman a clef. Certainly, there are plenty of deeply embedded jokes about musicians and their foibles. Amid all this drollery the reader may labour to summon up much sympathy for Lethem’s cast of precious, nerdy poseurs.

The character to whom we get closest is hard-drinking bassist Lucinda Hoekke, who works for a phoneline that allows the terminally bored to bleat about their grievances. This isn’t a public service, but in fact a strange form of installation art; the people who call ”disparage the quality of restaurants” or complain how hard it is to get anyone to read their screenplays, and the sum effect is a hokey ”happening”, sub-Warholian and silly.

Meanwhile, scrawnily handsome vocalist Matthew Plangent works at a zoo and, feeling maudlin, abducts a kangaroo called Shelf, which he sequesters in his bathroom. Lead guitarist Bedwin Greenish obsessively watches a video of Fritz Lang’s film noir Human Desire and extracts from it all manner of metaphysical wisdom. Denise Urban, the drummer, is employed selling sex toys at a store called No Shame. Their surnames grate, and so do their attitudes and manners.

The band’s identity crystallises only when one of Lucinda’s regular callers - a ”brilliant” aphorist known to her as The Complainer, triggers an orgy of creativity; she appropriates some of his more neatly phrased ideas, drops them into conversation with Bedwin, and waits for sparks to fly. True to form, this unwitting catalyst turns out to be called Carlton Vogelsong. And when he finds out that the band is benefiting from his input, he wants a piece of the action, which allows Lethem to say some sharp things about the nature of plagiarism.

In a novel portraying musicians, the reader has to be engaged. If the book is about Mozart or Johnny Cash, our feeling for the music will be a given. With a fictitious band, the central difficulty is this: the music’s appeal has to be evoked, but a description of a ”chiming guitar figure” is much less invigorating than the real thing. Maybe the novel ought to come with a CD: as it is, the creative chemistry that should be at its heart is rendered somewhat prosaically.

There are moments when Lethem does beautifully capture some of the magic of musicianship. For instance, the band experience an epiphany the first time one of their songs really grips an audience: this is ”the moment when time stops its hectic flow and earth’s atmosphere expands... to make room for something new, embodied by themselves”. Too much of the book, though, is taken up with fatuous chatter and scenes of knowing kookiness. Lethem has previously described music as ”the art that other art flatters itself by bending towards”: here, in bending far, he has stooped, by his standards, quite low. Some bravura passages notwithstanding, You Don’t Love Me Yet is flimsy and sounds off-key.

Henry Hitchings is author of ”Dr Johnson’s Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World” (John Murray).