Jonathan Lethem

Lethem's new work You Don't Love Me Yet follows the romantic entanglements and unexpected success of a nameless young L.A. band and offers a sneakily profound examination of the longing to connect that inspires most great songs, love affairs, and guerrilla postering campaigns. And while most rock novels collapse the minute their authors try to describe a guitar lick's tastiness, Lethem - a music fanatic who's written ardent essays about everyone from Brian Eno to the Go-Betweens - manages to get his Greil Marcus on without tripping over the mike stand, finding rough poetry in the clamor of a band practice: "The song grew resolute, intractable, like some enormous watch spring that gained force the more tightly it was wound.

Q: You Don't Love Me Yet is a departure from your past two novels, Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, which both take place in Brooklyn. Why set this one in Los Angeles?

Lethem: When I started writing about Brooklyn, I was unearthing all of this murky personal depth. Here, I wanted the place to be more neutral. These characters are kind of ditsy about everything. It's a book about people with a very lazy sense of connection to where they're living.

Q: Did you spend much time in Los Angeles?

Lethem: I spent some time out there researching and being around those neighborhoods and letting serendipitous impressions creep right into the book. It was a book that was very open to chance. I had no idea, for instance, that I was going to write about the L.A. zoo. But one day I convinced someone - a big expert on Silver Lake and Echo Park - to spend a day with me. We went to the zoo. So I decided, okay, that must be for a reason.

Q: One of the characters in the book kidnaps a kangaroo from the zoo. This isn't the first time you've had kangaroos in your books. There are talking kangaroos in Gun with Occasional Music. There's also a picture of a kangaroo on your Web site. What gives?

Lethem: I never knew I was gonna write a second kangaroo book. In a way, I think I always owed them a correction. In my first book, I gave a male kangaroo a pouch, and he goes through the whole book with a pouch, and only after I published did someone point out that male kangaroos don't have pouches. So I had to come back to the subject in order to at least get the pouch right.

Q: I'm sure they appreciate it. Here you tell the story of a band and their one great gig. Were you living out your rock-star fantasies?

Lethem: My relationship to music is always vicarious. In a way, one of the big subjects of Fortress of Solitude was that yearning - when you feel you can't make music yourself, but you feel in some way that your emotional life plays out through that art form. As totally different as these books are, the one thing they have in common is that they're about that yearning.

Q: I love the song titles in the book: "Hell Is for Buildings." "Canary in a Coke Machine." "Actually Quite Funny."

Lethem: If I were ever in a band, I would probably have song titles just as stupid and clever as those. It's not like I'm really making fun of anybody, because those are things that I find funny. But definitely, I was fooling around and trying to get into the state of mind that I associate with the brief period of time in my twenties when I still had the delusion that I might become a musician.

Q: It's your picture on the cover of the book - next to a guitar. Is that why?

Lethem: I'm such a poser in that picture. I think it was taken in 1988. There I am beside this Telecaster guitar that I bought - and didn't know how to play - and my shirt is buttoned up to my neck. I loved it as a souvenir of all of those embarrassing feelings, where you glamorize yourself for the mirror. When the book was in very early production, I brought it to my editor and kind of jokingly said, "We ought to use this as the author photo." Somehow that joke ended up on the front of the book.

Q: There are also some pretty saucy sex scenes in the book. Were those fun to write?

Lethem: The one I was ambitious for - and I'm sure it's really uncomfortable in some ways - is the one that keeps going so long. I thought, What if you stayed in the sex scene for a while and let other things take place intermittently? There's a joke I like that's very politically incorrect: A guy is told by a friend how to fuck like a Chinaman. The Chinaman always stops and has a cigarette and stops and reads the newspaper and goes into the other room and does some stuff and then goes back. He thinks this is interesting, so he goes home and does this with his wife, and in the middle of his third break, she comes in from the other room, and says, "This is great, but why are we making love like a Chinaman?"

Q: I don't get it.

Lethem: It's a horrible, horrible joke, but I thought this sort of points to something. In life, sex sometimes fumbles through different parts of a day or an afternoon; other things can happen. So I thought, What if I let the characters stay in this place for a while?

Q: I felt pretty inadequate reading that section. I can't compete with that stamina...

Lethem: Everyone always drinks more and has more sex in books and movies. Lucinda is a funny character for me. I was starved for female companionship when I wrote Fortress of Solitude. It's such a lonely-guy's book. All the characters are bereft of women. I knew I wanted to have a woman be front and center in this book. There are parts of me in her, but she's also a fantasy of freedom.

Q: She fulfills that stereotype of the sexy female bass player.

Lethem: Yes. I think a girl bass player is very sexy. It's just iconic for me. When I was in high school, my favorite band - really one of my favorite bands ever - was the Talking Heads. So that wasn't a hard call. But it also goes with the half-assedness. You can also play the bass without being too great. That was Sid Vicious's instrument. If I ever had managed to get into a band, that probably would have been my passport. I know I can't sing or keep a steady beat, so I probably have to be hidden in plain sight with a bass.

Q: Do you listen to music when you're writing?

Lethem: I have a terror of silence - a white noise ringing in my ears - so there's usually some soundtrack. For this book, there were some signature bands I listened to that evoked the feeling of this band. I would cue the feelings with certain songs, partly because they're bands with two girls or two guys, which isn't really all that common: Fleetwood Mac and the Go-Betweens. And I listened to a lot of stuff from the Hoboken axis: the dBs, the Feelies. Those kind of jangly pop bands I grew up listening to.