After years of kicking around the five boroughs of New York City, Jonathan Lethem has found a new home out West in his latest novel, ‘You Don’t Love Me Yet’ (Doubleday). Gone are the girls playing double-dutch on the sidewalk and the boys hustling for subway tickets. In their place are vegetarian zoo-worker guitarists and masturbation shoppe employees.

Welcome to California.

He’s been here before in short stories and the back third of his last novel, ‘The Fortress of Solitude,’ but it’s still far from home. By leaving his panacea and comfort zone, he’s taking a risk.

Lethem, along with David Foster Wallace (‘Infinite Jest’) and Gary Shteyngart (‘The Russian Debutante’s Handbook’), leads the pack of today’s comic novelists. ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ and ‘Solitude,’ his past two novels, both set mainly in New York, rich in detail and ambiance, catapulted Lethem to the top of the literary heap.

Lethem’s a multi-tool talent. He can mine emotional depths, bend the genres of humor writing and science fiction, and wax philosophical on pop culture with ease.

‘You Don’t Love Me Yet’ continues in this vain, conversational and humorous as Lethem juxtaposes the dual pursuits of love and art.

The plot is simple (for Lethem at least). Lucinda and Matthew are an on-again, off-again couple who double as the bassist and lead singer of an alternative garage band (like a weak California Smashing Pumpkins) without a name, or a prayer of making it. Lucinda, while working for a complaint hotline, falls in love with a repeat caller – the Complainer. The Complainer offers the band ideas, the band capitalizes on them and then the Complainer insists on joining the band.

Disaster soon follows. Fascinating.

The novel is breezy and witty and reads relatively quickly at just more than 200 pages, and Lethem’s music writing is spot-on; he’s had some practice with two Rolling Stone features on James Brown and Bob Dylan, but something feels missing.

After the triumph of ‘The Fortress of Solitude’ – a thrilling, sprawling cross-section of superheroes, drug dealing, urban decay, ’70s punk and soul, graffiti and personal malaise that crackled with life – anything would feel like a let down. In his new location, Lethem loses a bit of the city energy that made his prose jump off the page.

His work certainly isn’t poor. He’s too talented for that, but it just seems off. There’s none of channeled lunacy of ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ or the rousing panorama of ‘Solitude’ to be found here.

Oh well. Go west, young Lethem, if you must.

Published on April 16, 2007 at 12:00 pm