A few years ago, author Jonathan Lethem found himself well on his way to becoming the Philip Roth of Brooklyn with his two most well-acclaimed novels, Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and The Fortress of Solitude (2003) — both colorful and incisive accounts of his hometown borough — quickly propelling him into the somewhat reluctant role of a Brooklynite mouthpiece.

It was for this very reason that Lethem felt compelled to set his new novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet, in the complex maelstrom that is Los Angeles. It’s a bold move, not only because of the notorious competition between New York and Los Angeles, but because Los Angeles is a difficult place to penetrate — even for those who live there.

“There’s that famous Joyce quote about ‘artists need silence, exile, and cunning,’” Lethem told me over the phone in late March, “and I guess I’d just been looking for that ‘exile’ part of things; working from the margins, doing preposterous things, disavowing one’s credentials.”

The novel — Lethem’s seventh — stars Lucinda Hoekke, a bass player stumbling into her thirties while living in Echo Park, an up-and-coming, yuppie-hipster Los Angeles neighborhood. Like many of the city’s residents, Lucinda works odd jobs as she tries to make it with her wannabe rock band. Her latest career move is answering phones at the Complaint Line, an anonymous help line conceived by her conceptual artist friend. Eight hours a day she fields complaints from callers responding to randomly placed stickers that read, “Complaints? Call 213-291-7778.” (The number really works: Try it.)

It’s there that Lucinda falls for a regular caller named Carlton Vogelsong — affectionately nicknamed “the Complainer” — who confides to Lucinda at length about his sexual escapades, but also about his feelings of emptiness and dissatisfaction with life. The Complainer also happens to be a professional slogan writer and, indeed, his utterances beguile the wayward Lucinda, who makes note of them and passes them on to her band’s lead singer and songwriter. The Complainer’s words soon become the lyrics for some of the band’s best songs, calling the material’s ownership into question as the band starts to grow more popular. As the songs take on a life of their own, no one is quite sure just where they originated.

The plotline recalls Lethem’s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence,” which was published in the February 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The essay explores the phenomenon of cultural borrowing and appropriation, and the effects of intellectual property rights. “The demarcation between various possible uses is beautifully graded and hard to define,” wrote Lethem in that essay, “the more so as artifacts distill into and repercuss through the realm of culture into which they’ve been entered, the more so as they engage the receptive minds for whom they were presumably intended.”

Appropriation is essential to creative vitality, Lethem reminds his readers, and strict copyright laws are consequently detrimental to artistic innovation. The essay urges consideration of the world of art and culture as a sort of public commons, impervious to possession by a singular person. “Copyright is a ‘right’ in no absolute sense; it is a government-granted monopoly on the use of creative results,” writes Lethem. “Whether the monopolizing beneficiary is a living artist or some artist's heirs or some corporation’s shareholders, the loser is the community, including living artists who might make splendid use of a healthy public domain.”

In that spirit, Lethem has initiated a project through his website called Promiscuous Materials that offers up his stories and lyrics at no cost for other artists to use, rework, and reinterpret at will. Already, artists such as One Ring Zero and John Linnell from They Might Be Giants have recorded songs to Lethem’s lyrics, and some short films are in the works.

Lethem has also recently announced that he will option out the film rights to You Don’t Love Me Yet to a filmmaker of his choice in exchange for just 2 percent of the profits once that film is made. In addition, both he and the filmmaker will give up ancillary rights to their respective creations five years after the film’s debut. By offering this nontraditional option, Lethem hopes to spark a reexamination of the typical ways in which art is commodified. “I also realized that sometimes giving things away — things that are usually seen to have an important and intrinsic ‘value,’ like a film option æ already felt like a meaningful part of what I do,” he writes on his website. “I wanted to do more of it.”

Lethem is not the originator of the battle against the increasingly tight grip of copyright laws; he points to Open Source theory and the Free Culture Movement as influences, as well as longtime collage artists like the American experimental band Negativland. But as a successful mainstream author, Lethem is a uniquely compelling advocate. “Almost everyone you find clamoring for strengthening the public domain or for reexamining the regime of intellectual property control that’s so typical right now is not so much like me,” Lethem told me. “I think there’s a really kind of sad abdication of this conversation by more established artists. That’s why I felt that I had a role to play in this talk.”

Projects such as Promiscuous Materials and the You Don’t Love Me Yet film rights option are potent responses to the rampant propagation of intellectual property rights — more effective, probably, than the latent messages encoded in the plot of Lethem’s new novel. It would be easy to create parallels. For instance, in the book, when the Complainer learns that the band’s hit songs contain his lyrics, he burrows his way into becoming a member — “Do you want to destroy the band?” the drummer asks the Complainer when he claims credit for the songs. “How could I want to do that?” he responds. “I basically am the band.” But this unpopular addition results in the band’s demise. Thus, the Complainer’s aggressive move to assert creative ownership ultimately destroys the artistic product.

Yet Lethem is quick to downplay the connection. “Of course, it comes out of a similar instinct, but it’s not like the book was written as a heavy way of bearing down on any idea. It sort of glances off those thoughts. But the book is, I hope, a little too frisky to seem like it’s got a big and ponderous agenda like that.”

As advised, it’s best to read You Don’t Love Me Yet as a light and playful “sex and rock ‘n’ roll” novel rather than overestimate its relation to Lethem’s crusade against what he calls “usemonopoly.” Though some reviewers are dismayed by the novel’s slightness as compared to the wondrous complexities of Lethem’s more major works such as Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, it is not definitively disastrous for an author to maintain some equilibrium of tone and substance. As the Complainer says in the novel, “You can’t be deep without a surface.” Jonathan Lethem has sufficiently proved his depth as a writer; let us allow him his surface.

In The Fray Contributor