I have my start but I've never begun

I finished reading You Don't Love Me Yet during my evening BART commute tonight, so I've read my one novel for NaJuReMoNoMo.

I haven't read anything else by Jonathan Lethem, but I thought this story was pretty good. The one issue I had with the book was that I could only relate to one of the characters (the lead songwriter Bedwin) and he was a minor one. All the other characters were kind of annoying. It was like the first season of Friends, where you could only relate to Ross's monkey Marcel. That show went straight to hell after the monkey left.

My favorite part of the novel was the bit on page 168) where Bedwin mentions that "every movie has one actor you wished the whole movie was about. In a bad one, you might only see them for a minute, they'll be playing a bellhop in a hotel or something. In a pretty good movie, they'd have a supporting part. In a great movie, they'll turn up in every scene". That was how I came to rate You Don't Love Me Yet as "pretty good", because Bedwin is just in a supporting role. If he was more prominent, I'd rate the book as "great".

My other favorite part was when the band in the book was trying to come up with a name, and Bedwin suggested calling themselves Monster Eyes after one of their songs. This prompted a long discussion about bands named after song titles then Bedwin said "

Black Sabbath has a song called 'Black Sabbath'. And Devo has 'Are We Not Men? We Are Devo'. There's 'Clash City Rockers','Give It To The Soft Boys', and the Verlaines have a song whose whole chorus is the word 'Verlaine' over and over again."

This prompts the drummer Denise to say "that's enough Bedwin", but I have to give my props to any novel that mentions the Soft Boys and the Verlaines. Bedwin is the sort of guy who constantly mentions music and movie esoterica, not so much to impress people, but because it's the only thing he knows enough to talk about.

There's another part where Lethem mentions "carapace shells" when they're eating lobsters on the beach. If he could have followed it with a reference to "black lace thighs" or "I Don't know how he ever gets anywhere with you", You Don't Love Me Yet would have been my favorite novel of the 21st century. As it was, it's just "pretty good".