Girl, boy, and band mix it up in Lethem's LA medley

You Don't Love Me Yet
By Jonathan Lethem
Doubleday, 224 pp., $24.95

Jonathan Lethem has retreated. After the enormous critical and commercial success of his previous two novels, "Motherless Brooklyn" (which won the National Book Critics Circle Award) and "The Fortress of Solitude," Lethem's new novel is a conscious step away from the obsessions that characterized those works. Instead of New York, so lovingly appraised in those novels, we have Los Angeles; instead of their neurotic, crabbed male protagonists, we have a flighty female lead character; and after taking two steps away from his roots in science fiction, Lethem takes a half-step back in that direction.

His science fiction has little to do with aliens or robots, nor does it bear much in common with his professed literary hero , Philip K. Dick. Instead, Lethem is a science fiction writer in the manner of Steve Erickson: in his depiction of urban spaces magnetized by a sense of the uncanny, hyper-stylized and sprinkled with a light dusting of magic realism. The Erickson connection is a potent one, for "You Don't Love Me Yet" is Lethem returning to Los Angeles (where he lived for a number of years) via Erickson's sense of the city gone off its moorings, filled with spectral hotel rooms, bare lofts overlooking the vast metropolis, and lost souls weighed with possibility and foreboding. That "You Don't Love Me Yet" is a rock 'n' roll novel, a comedy of hipster manners, is ultimately less an undermining of its roots in Erickson than a clandestine burial , a hasty interring of its subject matter.

Lucinda and Matthew are the cofounders of a band, and long time on-and-off lovers. As "You Don't Love Me Yet" begins, they are breaking up again -- this time for real, or so they say. Lucinda is concerned with the breakup's effect on their band, which has yet to play a gig, record a demo, or even receive a proper name. Matthew is distracted by his day job at the zoo, where a depressive kangaroo has taken hold of his affections, and whose maltreatment has forced him to kidnap and care for it in his cramped apartment. The outlook for the band, and Lucinda's love life, perks up when she takes a gig answering phones for a conceptual artist's latest installation . One repeat caller strikes Lucinda's fancy with his penchant for bumper-sticker bons mots, or "itchy phrases," as he refers to them -- phrases she turns over to her band's songwriter, the painfully shy Bedwin, to craft into lyrics.

The complainer, as Lucinda comes to think of him, worms his way into her affections. A turbulent evening of passionate sex and impassioned talk turns Lucinda's life inside out, leaving her ready to jettison the flotsam of her prior existence. For Carl, as the complainer is called, experience trumps language, with words only hammering in the last nails in the coffin of unnameable, unclassifiable reality: "Don't give it a name. . . . This doesn't need a name," he says of their glorious night together. Carl wants to keep language from getting its dirty paws all over experience, but such purity remains forever out of reach.

Lucinda, as we come to understand , is susceptible to a deep-seated romanticism that torpedoes her good sense. Waiting for her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend in the book's opening scene, she spots a minimalist sculpture and muses on their mutual auras: "Lucinda had paused at two heroic pillars of neon, mounted on either side of a doorway, and seen only versions of herself and Matthew: discrete, sealed, radiant." The neon is, of course, liable to burn out at any time, but Lucinda prefers the spotlights of her life over its low-wattage, flickering bulbs.

Perhaps her most significant lapse of judgment concerns the complainer, who, as it turns out, is both savior and destroyer of the band, now named Monster Eyes after one of his aperçus. The band's first show is a stunning success, getting them a booking on a tastemaker's radio show, but Carl hijacks their big opportunity to indulge his self-absorbed notion of the artist's mission. The band, stalled in shallow water at the book's start, finds itself cut loose on the high seas at its end, forcing Lucinda to swim back to shore.

A side benefit for Lethem of the musical setting is the opportunity to indulge his inner rock critic. He describes one of the band's songs as "a defiant tirade by a guest wronged by his hosts, over a set of changes that might be the billionth rewrite of some three-chord chestnut . . . but played with conviction and vigor by the band, who associate the song . . . with the uncovering of their own capacity to join in birthing ferocious noise." "You Don't Love Me Yet" is a novel in love with the magical glow of musical creation, finding its few moments of grace in the act of turning three chords and some stray words into song, but its real muse is that musical Jerusalem, Los Angeles. Lethem finds beauty in its monuments to kitsch, its hipster ghettos, and its air of impermanence, but where his extravagant love for New York in "Motherless Brooklyn" and "The Fortress of Solitude" was matched by an equally wide- screen scope of narrative, he has shrunk himself to fit the narrower confines of his new book. He is too large a writer to make himself so small.

Saul Austerlitz is the author of "Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video From the Beatles to the White Stripes."