carolyn kellogg

Some elements of a road trip you can plan, some you can’t. Among the latter:

– the price of gas
– inclement weather (15 degrees below average)
– evil, tenacious head cold
– NY weekend warrior traffic, if you’re on the 84 anytime on Friday
– NPR pledge week (noooo!)

On the up side, with the internet, any stranger can make their way through miles of windy, wooded streets to the local coffeeshop, the one with acoustic music on weekend nights, slipcovered couches and hearty espresso. Hooray for Molten Java.

Today’s photo, however, is from a diner yesterday. (more here)

After the jump, my spoiler-ridden take on You Don’t Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem.

You Don’t Love Me Yet is an admittedly frothy story of LA, aspiring musicians, art world pretentions and self-absorbed late 20-somethings. Underlying the story are ideas of expropriation and artistic ownership.

I have to start by saying that he absolutely nails LA’s eastside of a few years ago; the LA Times gets this wrong. I used to live directly across from the happy foot/sad foot sign, and while I didn’t use it as an omen, I know Beck did (his place was on the other side of Sunset from mine). Lethem’s hipsters eat at Millie’s, think of San Pedro and Malibu as far, foreign lands, and drive down a deserted Sunset Blvd on Saturday morning. All true. And on page 92, describing a crowd that’s showed up for the art/anti-music event that will make the protagonist’s band famous, he rattles off several made-up names and then drops in “John Huck.” Jon Huck! A proto-hipster, someone who everyone knows and also, miraculously, likes, who likes and knows almost everyone in return, who doesn’t live in Echo Park or Silverlake but Elysian Hills, an eastside corner that’s still hidden enough to be genuinely cool. OK, there’s an extra “h” in the novel version, but it’s a throwaway nod to a certain generation of Silverlakers. (Disclosure: Jon Huck knows my friends, but he doesn’t know me. Of course, I know who Jon Huck is). Anyway, this is just by way of saying that Lethem, who says he didn’t want to be stuffed into the “Brooklyn writer” category, did a great job of writing an LA novel.

Some have said that the book is a satire, but on that level it isn’t particularly successful. A kidnapped kangaroo and an armpit-sniffer don’t a satire make; perhaps its because there are no consequences for the oddness. It doesn’t go anywhere, or turn the plot at all. At best, it is funny once in a while; it does end on a satiric note.

And here’s my real issue with the novel, which I liked parts of very much. Lucinda, the protagonist, isn’t quite believable. As I was reading, I found her involvement with the complainer mysterious but acceptable at first; eventually, though, it rang increasingly untrue. And, if she really just is a fame-hungry slut (as the end would have us believe), then her affair with the middle-aged, only marginally attractive complainer would never have happened.

That said, the affair’s sex is great. I mean, never devolves into crummy sex, and the sex scenes are genuinely sexy. Enough so that when I was sitting at that diner, I really hoped neither of my countermates turned their eyes to the pages I was reading.

The issues of ownership and appropriation that the novel raises are interesting. Lethem is certainly qualified to talk about musical progenitors, from acknowledged influences to stolen riffs, and the fact that he’s turned those ideas to the written word is, well, cool. I don’t think he’s necessarily come up with all the answers — only the lucky have enough dough stashed away to give away the movie rights to their novels — but he’s definitely raising thoughtful questions. Which I’m not addressing here because the road is calling.

One note, though: while “You Don’t Love Me Yet” is a great title for this book, I can’t say the words in my head without hearing the voice of Ann Magnuson, back when she sang lead for Bongwater, when they recorded the song for the 1990 tribute album Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye. “You Don’t Love Me Yet” was originally written in the 1960s by mad Texas genius Roky Erickson for his band The 13th Floor Elevators. I might not have known the 13th Floor Elevators without the tribute record (well, I did, but I like garage rock); and now, with Lethem’s novel “borrowing” the song title, more people may trace their way back through now-defunct Bongwater to the original work of a guy who, before winding up in a nuthouse, wrote great music some 40 years ago. Which demonstrates that intertextual borrowing/building/expropriating/stealing can be good for the the cultural slipstream — for those upstream and down.