• Fiction. By Jonathan Lethem. Doubleday, 256 pages, $24.95.Grade: C

Plot in a nutshell: Lucinda Hoekke plays the bass in a fledgling L.A. rock band that hasn't yet played its first gig. As the story opens, she quits her job at a coffee shop and breaks up with the band's good-looking singer, who works as a veterinary nurse at the zoo. Lucinda takes a job offered by another ex-boyfriend, Falmouth, a wealthy conceptual artist (one of his works: a white crate labeled "Chamber Containing the Volumetric Representation of the Number of Hours It Took Me To Arrive at This Idea"). Lucinda starts to work in one of Falmouth's "theatrical pieces": a fake office in which she answers an advertised "complaint line," and jots notes of callers' gripes.

One repeat caller begins to fascinate Lucinda, just as the band starts to gel. When the guitarist who writes the band's songs is unable to supply lyrics to new tunes he's created, Lucinda gives him the notes from her complainer's conversations without telling him what they are.

Lucinda eventually arranges to meet with the "brilliant complainer," who turns out to be at least twice her age and overweight, but sexually magnetic nevertheless. The band prepares for its first gig. Meanwhile, Lucinda's first ex-boyfriend becomes concerned that his favorite kangaroo isn't being well cared for at the zoo, and smuggles the animal to his apartment. You'd think madcap hilarity would ensue, but it doesn't really.

Sample of prose: Lethem's prose is uncharacteristically turgid, as in this description of the band's first gig: "So with no way to celebrate without getting silly, as the unseen hand behind the purple spotlights now shifts a single white spot to the mirror ball and the room is spangled, silly's what the crowd gets."

Pros: Lethem's gift for dialogue is evident, despite the prose in which it's embedded.

Cons: For a book that its publicist describes as "a comic novel," You Don't Love Me Yet isn't terribly funny, probably because Lethem has chosen to use distant, adverb-laden language to write about a subject - rock music - that calls for a more direct, elemental approach. He's clearly using affected language to evoke the euphoria a rock band instills in its fans and members, but instead, he comes off sounding like an eager college newspaper music critic who has just discovered Derrida.

Final word: Lethem's career had been building to his last novel, 2003's marvelous, deeply felt Fortress of Solitude. Fans can only hope the style represented here isn't the direction he hopes to take from now on. Curiously, when Lethem writes about nerdy subjects like the comic books in Solitude, he comes across as hip, and when he tries to write about a cool subject - a rock band - the result is nerdy.