You Don't Love Me Yet, by Jonathan Lethem

This has the bold, ludic opening that one expects from a new Jonathan Lethem novel. Matthew and Lucinda, respectively singer and bassist in a fledgling arthouse band, are trying to split up for the umpteenth time in an amicable way that allows them to remain bandmates and friends but not lovers. They meet to formalise this in an art gallery exhibiting their friend Falmouth's recent installation: a painted cube with a hardly noticeable door, leading to a tiny, furnished interior. Enticed inside and perhaps aroused by the Alice in Wonderland space restrictions, they inevitably opt for a quick shag. This brief, ribald overture sets the tone of Lethem's clever entertainment, in which passionate and posturing approaches to artistic creativity are wrapped comfortably inside a gentle and hip romantic comedy.

The band - which hasn't yet agreed on a name, or played a gig - aspires to an edgy sound. Lucinda's libidinal bass pulses under the "peppery" snap of Denise's snare. Mild-mannered Matthew's scurrying voice tackles the few angsty songs by Bedwin, their chronically shy and apologetic guitarist, written before he hit writer's block. Falmouth, by contrast, exhibits neither fervour nor lack of confidence in his substance-light conceptual projects, which Lethem drily invests with a galling contemporary plausibility. Smug and urbane, he employs Lucinda in his new "theatrical piece" in which, eight hours a day in a fake office, she has to answer real callers who ring a fly-post advertised "Complaint Line" to air their random grievances. This passive aesthetic collides with the band's sought-after dynamic when one Complainer's gnomic utterances give Lucinda the inspiration for new songs.

Chief amongst these is "Monster Eyes", blooming out of the Complainer's confession of a nervous tic that forces him to find aspects to hate in any object of love. Lethem has played with similar ideas before with both comic and sympathetic effect. Lionel Essrog, the "human freakshow" hero of Lethem's award-winning novel Motherless Brooklyn, hilariously struggled with Tourette's syndrome which forced him to spout an uncontrollable riff of seeming inanities during anxious moments. Lionel is a wonderful creation, funny and unassuming, but quietly heroic in his dogged pursuit of truth.

Unlike Lionel's naïve quest, the pursuit of meaning in You Don't Love Me Yet is layered in aesthetic and semantic textures. When the complainer yearns for a sense of "Nostalgia vu... longing for longing instead of the thing in question", Lethem raises the exquisitely charged pleasure of anticipation. His slim novel is thronged with relationships that have soured once the goal has been achieved, as though having needs and desires has a greater wistful currency than the fulfilment of those desires and the removal of need.

You can't have depth without surface, quips the Complainer in one of his typically banal aphorisms that is at once superficial and true. Lethem both parodies and endorses this idea, allowing the surface ripple of conversation to flow over the jazzy rhythms of his prose to create an alluring story that shimmers with uncertain depths. Lethem is a great stylist of arresting images ("like a child marinating in your own crimes") and volatile compressions, such as: "Lucinda felt a sweet nostalgia stirring of affection, almost like green shoots of horniness under the pavement of her hangover." His skill with conversation and an off-the-wall sub-plot involving a kangaroo (redolent of Haruki Murakami's naturalistic surrealities) make for a fluent and engrossing tale.

Lethem's latest offering feels like a light-hearted riposte to his acclaimed but dense opus The Fortress of Solitude, which was rooted in Lethem's familiar Brooklyn. Witty and charming, You Don't Love Me Yet breezes through LA's iconoclastic anonymity with a refreshing sincerity.