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Motherless Brooklyn
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.
A compelling and complusively readable riff on the classic detective novel from America's most inventive novelist.
Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim's widow skips town. Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. Motherless Brooklyn is a brilliantly original, captivating homage to the classic detective novel by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.
A compelling and complusively readable riff on the classic detective novel from America's most inventive novelist.
Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim's widow skips town. Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. Motherless Brooklyn is a brilliantly original, captivating homage to the classic detective novel by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.
324 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1999
About the author
Jonathan Lethem
223 books2,516 followersJonathan Allen Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer.
His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller.
In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship
His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller.
In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 3,568 reviews
February 26, 2018
What is it about Brooklyn? A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Joe Pitt in Half the Blood of Brooklyn. Last Exit to Brooklyn. Not to mention a hundred different movies. Something there must spark the imagination, get at the essence of life.
Motherless Brooklyn is one of the most solidly crafted books I've read this year. Since it's the end of February that may not sound like much, so I'll throw in December and November of 2017 as well. Really, it was just so pleasant to trust in Lethem, with page after page doing fascinating things. I was distrustful at first, I admit; the protagonist has a serious case of Tourette's Syndrome whiched seemed like an Authorial Big Idea that could go awfully wrong. But it doesn't. It's handled with aplomb, with sensitivity, with humor; with an even hand that gives expression to the experience.
"My mouth won’t quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I’m reading aloud, my Adam’s apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks empty of breath and tone."
But a man with Tourette's is not really what this is about, not really. This is a homicide, a mystery which our protagonist, Lionel, feels compelled to solve. Since his teens, Lionel has worked as a small-time muscle for mentor and eventual friend Frank Minna. Lionel and Gerald are supposed to be back-up support for Frank at a meeting. Things go terribly wrong, and the relationships within Minna's Men become fragile and uncertain.
"Together [the streets] made a crisscrossed game board of Frank Minna’s alliances and enmities, and me and Gil Coney and the other Agency Men were the markers—like Monopoly pieces, I sometimes thought, tin automobiles or terriers (not top hats, surely)—to be moved around that game board. Here on the Upper East Side we were off our customary map, Automobile and Terrier in Candyland—or maybe in the study with Colonel Mustard."
Lionel is a likable hero, Tourette's and all, driven to explain and organize around him. He's an observant and humorous narrator, and if he is occasionally led around by his id, he's aware enough to understand it. Communication is, of course, a challenge for Lionel. I was afraid it would always be played for laughs, or worse yet, for pity, but Lethem has a nice balance between the internal thoughts and the external expression that allows for the occasional laughs with him instead of at him.
"My jaw worked, chewing the words back down, keeping silent. Gilbert’s hands gripped the wheel, mine drummed quietly in my lap, tiny hummingbird motions. This is what passed for cool around here."
I went in expecting a mystery, and Lethem delivers, certainly. But wrapped up in the mystery is a solid, thoughtful portrayal of man who was given the closest thing to family and companionship he ever knew by a low-level mobster. The mobster, in turn, gets much of his own portrayal, at least from Lionel's viewpoint. It ends up being a bit of a bromance, or a non-jerk example of the 'dick-fic' genre (see The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death). At one point, I realized with some surprised that I was reading a solid literary-fiction kind of book, with beautiful writing and human drama, wrapped up in a mystery.
"The ashtray on the counter was full of cigarette butts that had been in Minna’s fingers, the telephone log full of his handwriting from earlier in the day. The sandwich on top of the fridge wore his bite marks. We were all four of us an arrangement around a missing centerpiece, as incoherent as a verbless sentence."
Unlike mystery-thrillers, it isn't a particularly teeth-clenching, anxiety-producing kind of book (except, perhaps, on behalf of Lionel) that requires one to stay up late to read 'one more page.' Yet there's something quite solid about it, curious, moving, wry and intriguing that let me immerse myself whenever I picked it up. I feel like there's also solid re-read potential here. In fact, I think I will. Might even be worth adding to my own library. Reminds me of Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, and that's high praise indeed. I'll have to check out The Fortress of Solitude, also by Letham, when I can handle some straight-up lit-fic.
Four and a half--EatmeBailey--tics, rounding up
Motherless Brooklyn is one of the most solidly crafted books I've read this year. Since it's the end of February that may not sound like much, so I'll throw in December and November of 2017 as well. Really, it was just so pleasant to trust in Lethem, with page after page doing fascinating things. I was distrustful at first, I admit; the protagonist has a serious case of Tourette's Syndrome whiched seemed like an Authorial Big Idea that could go awfully wrong. But it doesn't. It's handled with aplomb, with sensitivity, with humor; with an even hand that gives expression to the experience.
"My mouth won’t quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I’m reading aloud, my Adam’s apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks empty of breath and tone."
But a man with Tourette's is not really what this is about, not really. This is a homicide, a mystery which our protagonist, Lionel, feels compelled to solve. Since his teens, Lionel has worked as a small-time muscle for mentor and eventual friend Frank Minna. Lionel and Gerald are supposed to be back-up support for Frank at a meeting. Things go terribly wrong, and the relationships within Minna's Men become fragile and uncertain.
"Together [the streets] made a crisscrossed game board of Frank Minna’s alliances and enmities, and me and Gil Coney and the other Agency Men were the markers—like Monopoly pieces, I sometimes thought, tin automobiles or terriers (not top hats, surely)—to be moved around that game board. Here on the Upper East Side we were off our customary map, Automobile and Terrier in Candyland—or maybe in the study with Colonel Mustard."
Lionel is a likable hero, Tourette's and all, driven to explain and organize around him. He's an observant and humorous narrator, and if he is occasionally led around by his id, he's aware enough to understand it. Communication is, of course, a challenge for Lionel. I was afraid it would always be played for laughs, or worse yet, for pity, but Lethem has a nice balance between the internal thoughts and the external expression that allows for the occasional laughs with him instead of at him.
"My jaw worked, chewing the words back down, keeping silent. Gilbert’s hands gripped the wheel, mine drummed quietly in my lap, tiny hummingbird motions. This is what passed for cool around here."
I went in expecting a mystery, and Lethem delivers, certainly. But wrapped up in the mystery is a solid, thoughtful portrayal of man who was given the closest thing to family and companionship he ever knew by a low-level mobster. The mobster, in turn, gets much of his own portrayal, at least from Lionel's viewpoint. It ends up being a bit of a bromance, or a non-jerk example of the 'dick-fic' genre (see The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death). At one point, I realized with some surprised that I was reading a solid literary-fiction kind of book, with beautiful writing and human drama, wrapped up in a mystery.
"The ashtray on the counter was full of cigarette butts that had been in Minna’s fingers, the telephone log full of his handwriting from earlier in the day. The sandwich on top of the fridge wore his bite marks. We were all four of us an arrangement around a missing centerpiece, as incoherent as a verbless sentence."
Unlike mystery-thrillers, it isn't a particularly teeth-clenching, anxiety-producing kind of book (except, perhaps, on behalf of Lionel) that requires one to stay up late to read 'one more page.' Yet there's something quite solid about it, curious, moving, wry and intriguing that let me immerse myself whenever I picked it up. I feel like there's also solid re-read potential here. In fact, I think I will. Might even be worth adding to my own library. Reminds me of Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, and that's high praise indeed. I'll have to check out The Fortress of Solitude, also by Letham, when I can handle some straight-up lit-fic.
Four and a half--EatmeBailey--tics, rounding up
April 28, 2017
“In detective stories things are always always, the detective casting his exhausted, caustic gaze over the corrupted permanence of everything and thrilling you with his sweetly savage generalizations. This or that runs deep or true to form, is invariable, exemplary. Oh sure. Seen it before, will see it again. Trust me on this one.
Assertions and generalizations are, of course, a version of Tourette’s. A way of touching the world, handling it, covering it with confirming language.”
This was a very tightly crafted mystery, with a lot of soul, and a wonderful resolution. A love letter to the classic detective novel, but also a love letter to loneliness. I’ve heard some people say that it felt too gimmicky, and to them I’d say “You’re missing the point. The parts you thought were gimmicky were just the reality that the character inhabited. It’s your fault you thought it was meant to be funny, and you might also be kind of an asshole.”
After reading this, in my non-expert self diagnosis, I think I may have some very subtle, extremely manageable Tourette’s going on.
When I was a kid, I ticced like you wouldn’t believe. I’d clamp my eyes shut in the middle of conversations and stop talking. I’d grind my jaw left and right until it ached. I’d grind my left shoulder blade on my ribs over and over again. I only ever did one of these things at a time, and I had no control over them. I’d grunt repeatedly. I’d clench various muscles. Each new tic would overwrite the previous one. It was pretty debilitating back then. These days, all I do is clench my right arm really hard when I’m stressed, and roll my shoulders a little bit. Much better. Totally manageable.
But yeah, the book is good, you should check it out.
Assertions and generalizations are, of course, a version of Tourette’s. A way of touching the world, handling it, covering it with confirming language.”
This was a very tightly crafted mystery, with a lot of soul, and a wonderful resolution. A love letter to the classic detective novel, but also a love letter to loneliness. I’ve heard some people say that it felt too gimmicky, and to them I’d say “You’re missing the point. The parts you thought were gimmicky were just the reality that the character inhabited. It’s your fault you thought it was meant to be funny, and you might also be kind of an asshole.”
After reading this, in my non-expert self diagnosis, I think I may have some very subtle, extremely manageable Tourette’s going on.
When I was a kid, I ticced like you wouldn’t believe. I’d clamp my eyes shut in the middle of conversations and stop talking. I’d grind my jaw left and right until it ached. I’d grind my left shoulder blade on my ribs over and over again. I only ever did one of these things at a time, and I had no control over them. I’d grunt repeatedly. I’d clench various muscles. Each new tic would overwrite the previous one. It was pretty debilitating back then. These days, all I do is clench my right arm really hard when I’m stressed, and roll my shoulders a little bit. Much better. Totally manageable.
But yeah, the book is good, you should check it out.
April 6, 2022
TESTADIPAZZO
Edward Norton acquistò i diritti del romanzo alla sua uscita, e gli ci sono voluti vent’anni per realizzarlo. Questa è la sua seconda regia, quasi 20 anni dopo la prima. Lionel sulla pagina è ben più giovane di Norton. L’intera vicenda nel film viene spostata agli anni Cinquanta invece che a metà ’90. Qui Norton è con Bruce Willis che interpreta Frank Minna.
I motherless, i senza madre sono i quattro pseudo investigatori privati, incluso Lionel, l’io narrante, orfani che provengono dallo stesso istituto, che lavorano per Frank Minna, che viene ucciso pressoché all’inizio e nominato ossessivamente per tutto il resto del romanzo in quanto i quattro, ma soprattutto Lionel, l’io narrante, si impegnano a scoprire chi è il suo assassino.
Norton impegnato nella regia del film presentato pochi giorni fa alla Festa del Cinema di Roma , film d’apertura dell’edizione 2019.
Ho detto ossessivamente perché Lionel, l’io narrante, soffre della sindrome di Tourette. Ecco un assaggio:
Vi siete ormai accorti che rapporto tutto alla mia Tourette? Già, avete indovinato, è un tic. Contare è un sintomo, ma è un sintomo anche contare i sintomi, un tic plus ultra. Ho una meta-Tourette. Penso ai tic, con la mente che vortica, i pensieri che si protendono per toccare ogni possibile sintomo. Toccare i tocchi. Contare i conti. Pensare i pensieri. Riferire i riferimenti alla Tourette. È un po’ come parlare del telefono al telefono, o spedire una lettera descrivendo la localizzazione delle varie caselle postali.
Norton/Lionel con Gugu Mbatha-Raw che interpreta un personaggio diverso dal romanzo. Il fatto è che Norton s’è innamorato del personaggio e ha voluto interpretarlo a ogni costo: ma intorno s’è dovuto inventare una trama diversa e più robusta per giustificare l’impresa (e la spesa).
Strana scelta questa di Lethem: mettere al centro della narrazione un personaggio ossessivo maniacale, ecolalico, che borbotta, bofonchia, rimbrotta, scimmiotta, si agita a scatti, muove le mani, ripete parole e gesti senza riuscire a frenarsi, un tic tira l’altro, tic mentali verbali e fisici, pulisce la polvere con una mano mentre con l’altra da buffetti sulla spalla del suo interlocutore salvo poi leccare quella spalla o tentare di baciare in fronte quell’interlocutore.
Bruce Willis, ben più elegante del piccolo boss di strada (neppure quartiere) del romanzo.
E niente viene risparmiato al lettore, ogni pagina è infarcita di corsivi che rappresentano il sonoro della Tourette:
Don't know from Zendo, Ken-like Zung Fu, Feng Shui master, Fungo bastard, Zen masturbation, Eat me!,
in lingua originale, nella traduzione invece:
Pierogi kumquat fonosushi! Picnic trimoniale! Trimonio Insaziabile! Addolcito fonopierogi! oppure Monaco monco Zendo! Monaco Monaco prendo! o ancora Zinzedi zenzuda! Mostro Pierogi maestro zen zelante. Zapping zazen Zsa Zsa. Zsa Zsa Gabordi (le citazioni provengono dalla stessa pagina).
Norton spiega una scena a Willem Dafoe.
E con un protagonista così voler scrivere un giallo, o thriller, o noir, una detective story, ambientata tra Brooklyn e Manhattan durante l’epoca Giuliani (due mandati, dal 1993 al 2001, ma qui siamo negli anni Novanta, dell’11 settembre non v’è eco, il romanzo è stato pubblicato nel 1999), a metà tra la burla e il motteggio, lo scherzo e l’esperimento, forse sofisticato, forse pirotecnico.
Edward Norton/Lionel impegnato nella sua attività di pseudo investigatore a scoprire il mistero della morte del suo mentore.
Riuscito il tentativo? Dal mio punto di vista direi di no. A giudicare dal successo e dai premi, invece, sì.
Lo spunto di partenza è bello: i quattro orfani che vivono nell’istituto raccattati/adottati da Frank Minna, un po’ piccolo malavitoso un po’ fallito. E anche il personaggio di Lionel è piuttosto originale: peccato che Lethem si limiti alla superficie, alla descrizione dei comportamenti da sindrome di Tourette senza tentare approfondimenti.
Alec Baldwin, altro interprete del film.
Parallelamente la trama investigativa è piuttosto piatta e scialba, per giunta conclusa con un banale spiegone. I delitti rimangono tutti fuori campo, scelta consapevole, ovvio, ma che riduce la tensione.
PS
Testadipazzo è il soprannome che Minna ha appiccicato a Lionel, un po’ per affetto un po’ per disprezzo. La prima edizione italiana uscì proprio con quel titolo, Testadipazzo.
Edward Norton acquistò i diritti del romanzo alla sua uscita, e gli ci sono voluti vent’anni per realizzarlo. Questa è la sua seconda regia, quasi 20 anni dopo la prima. Lionel sulla pagina è ben più giovane di Norton. L’intera vicenda nel film viene spostata agli anni Cinquanta invece che a metà ’90. Qui Norton è con Bruce Willis che interpreta Frank Minna.
I motherless, i senza madre sono i quattro pseudo investigatori privati, incluso Lionel, l’io narrante, orfani che provengono dallo stesso istituto, che lavorano per Frank Minna, che viene ucciso pressoché all’inizio e nominato ossessivamente per tutto il resto del romanzo in quanto i quattro, ma soprattutto Lionel, l’io narrante, si impegnano a scoprire chi è il suo assassino.
Norton impegnato nella regia del film presentato pochi giorni fa alla Festa del Cinema di Roma , film d’apertura dell’edizione 2019.
Ho detto ossessivamente perché Lionel, l’io narrante, soffre della sindrome di Tourette. Ecco un assaggio:
Vi siete ormai accorti che rapporto tutto alla mia Tourette? Già, avete indovinato, è un tic. Contare è un sintomo, ma è un sintomo anche contare i sintomi, un tic plus ultra. Ho una meta-Tourette. Penso ai tic, con la mente che vortica, i pensieri che si protendono per toccare ogni possibile sintomo. Toccare i tocchi. Contare i conti. Pensare i pensieri. Riferire i riferimenti alla Tourette. È un po’ come parlare del telefono al telefono, o spedire una lettera descrivendo la localizzazione delle varie caselle postali.
Norton/Lionel con Gugu Mbatha-Raw che interpreta un personaggio diverso dal romanzo. Il fatto è che Norton s’è innamorato del personaggio e ha voluto interpretarlo a ogni costo: ma intorno s’è dovuto inventare una trama diversa e più robusta per giustificare l’impresa (e la spesa).
Strana scelta questa di Lethem: mettere al centro della narrazione un personaggio ossessivo maniacale, ecolalico, che borbotta, bofonchia, rimbrotta, scimmiotta, si agita a scatti, muove le mani, ripete parole e gesti senza riuscire a frenarsi, un tic tira l’altro, tic mentali verbali e fisici, pulisce la polvere con una mano mentre con l’altra da buffetti sulla spalla del suo interlocutore salvo poi leccare quella spalla o tentare di baciare in fronte quell’interlocutore.
Bruce Willis, ben più elegante del piccolo boss di strada (neppure quartiere) del romanzo.
E niente viene risparmiato al lettore, ogni pagina è infarcita di corsivi che rappresentano il sonoro della Tourette:
Don't know from Zendo, Ken-like Zung Fu, Feng Shui master, Fungo bastard, Zen masturbation, Eat me!,
in lingua originale, nella traduzione invece:
Pierogi kumquat fonosushi! Picnic trimoniale! Trimonio Insaziabile! Addolcito fonopierogi! oppure Monaco monco Zendo! Monaco Monaco prendo! o ancora Zinzedi zenzuda! Mostro Pierogi maestro zen zelante. Zapping zazen Zsa Zsa. Zsa Zsa Gabordi (le citazioni provengono dalla stessa pagina).
Norton spiega una scena a Willem Dafoe.
E con un protagonista così voler scrivere un giallo, o thriller, o noir, una detective story, ambientata tra Brooklyn e Manhattan durante l’epoca Giuliani (due mandati, dal 1993 al 2001, ma qui siamo negli anni Novanta, dell’11 settembre non v’è eco, il romanzo è stato pubblicato nel 1999), a metà tra la burla e il motteggio, lo scherzo e l’esperimento, forse sofisticato, forse pirotecnico.
Edward Norton/Lionel impegnato nella sua attività di pseudo investigatore a scoprire il mistero della morte del suo mentore.
Riuscito il tentativo? Dal mio punto di vista direi di no. A giudicare dal successo e dai premi, invece, sì.
Lo spunto di partenza è bello: i quattro orfani che vivono nell’istituto raccattati/adottati da Frank Minna, un po’ piccolo malavitoso un po’ fallito. E anche il personaggio di Lionel è piuttosto originale: peccato che Lethem si limiti alla superficie, alla descrizione dei comportamenti da sindrome di Tourette senza tentare approfondimenti.
Alec Baldwin, altro interprete del film.
Parallelamente la trama investigativa è piuttosto piatta e scialba, per giunta conclusa con un banale spiegone. I delitti rimangono tutti fuori campo, scelta consapevole, ovvio, ma che riduce la tensione.
PS
Testadipazzo è il soprannome che Minna ha appiccicato a Lionel, un po’ per affetto un po’ per disprezzo. La prima edizione italiana uscì proprio con quel titolo, Testadipazzo.
November 24, 2012
I used to have a customer with Tourette’s. Back when I was a teenage supermarket teller, a million and a half years ago, she used to come through my line routinely. At the time, I didn’t reflect much on her condition other than that I assumed it must be tough for her occasionally, but how tough it really was I considered only in the vaguest sense, to the extent that I considered it at all. (Sorry, lady, but I was 17 and had a whole slew of 17 year-old thoughts to preoccupy myself with.) She seemed to handle it in stride, though, or least this was my impression of our brief bi-weekly interactions—I certainly don’t remember there being any social awkwardness. It probably helped, too, that she never made any apologies for her outbursts.
So it was interesting for me, with Motherless Brooklyn, to experience life through the first-person perspective of Lionel Essrog, a man with, not only Tourette’s, but also its oft-accompanying sidekick, obsessive-compulsive disorder. With the little foreknowledge I have of these syndromes, I’m not able to say whether the novel faithfully represents them, but I’d like to think it does. Aside from the neuropsychiatric issues, Essrog also has a fascinating character history. Inexplicably orphaned at a young age, he grows up in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood and is recruited by a low-level Italian mobster whose eventual murder serves as the basis for the book’s detective-story plot. Essrog’s physical and verbal tics—which are conspicuously present throughout the investigation—do not impede the reader’s enjoyment of the novel, as his internal dialogue remains unhindered by the disorder (other than expressing an oncoming urge to shout or tap or straighten or poke), all of which I believe is consistent with the way Tourette’s presents in its sufferers. What’s more, Essrog’s tics almost endear the reader to him. I felt a kinship with the misunderstood, relatively lonely man who is driven by a misguided sense of loyalty in the search for his mentor’s killer.
Being at its core a mystery/crime thriller, Motherless Brooklyn at times falls prey to some of the clichés of the genre, but Lethem succeeds in transcending this label by writing with, I don’t know, heart or something. Essorg’s world, touched as it is by inner-city dealings and by mob activity, is still somewhat insular and claustrophobic. It’s his relationship to the elements of this tiny world, however, that drive his motivations and make this book among the more interesting crime novels I’ve read in a while.
So it was interesting for me, with Motherless Brooklyn, to experience life through the first-person perspective of Lionel Essrog, a man with, not only Tourette’s, but also its oft-accompanying sidekick, obsessive-compulsive disorder. With the little foreknowledge I have of these syndromes, I’m not able to say whether the novel faithfully represents them, but I’d like to think it does. Aside from the neuropsychiatric issues, Essrog also has a fascinating character history. Inexplicably orphaned at a young age, he grows up in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood and is recruited by a low-level Italian mobster whose eventual murder serves as the basis for the book’s detective-story plot. Essrog’s physical and verbal tics—which are conspicuously present throughout the investigation—do not impede the reader’s enjoyment of the novel, as his internal dialogue remains unhindered by the disorder (other than expressing an oncoming urge to shout or tap or straighten or poke), all of which I believe is consistent with the way Tourette’s presents in its sufferers. What’s more, Essrog’s tics almost endear the reader to him. I felt a kinship with the misunderstood, relatively lonely man who is driven by a misguided sense of loyalty in the search for his mentor’s killer.
Being at its core a mystery/crime thriller, Motherless Brooklyn at times falls prey to some of the clichés of the genre, but Lethem succeeds in transcending this label by writing with, I don’t know, heart or something. Essorg’s world, touched as it is by inner-city dealings and by mob activity, is still somewhat insular and claustrophobic. It’s his relationship to the elements of this tiny world, however, that drive his motivations and make this book among the more interesting crime novels I’ve read in a while.
November 11, 2015
I read this 'often hilarious'-[one-of-a-kind]-novel many years ago --
The main character has Tourette's syndrome. I must have read this about 10 years ago. I've yet to read another novel (crime-satire-whodunit-to boot), with a story centered around 'Tourette's syndrome.
No other author wanted to go toe-to-toe with, Jonathan Lethem, huh?
"Eat S*it"... "go F#*+K yourself" ...."Thehorrorthehorror" .....
and "Icouldabeenacontender!" is endearing in the most pure *Zen-in-the city*!
Wonderful reviews here on GR's that came before me!!!
The main character has Tourette's syndrome. I must have read this about 10 years ago. I've yet to read another novel (crime-satire-whodunit-to boot), with a story centered around 'Tourette's syndrome.
No other author wanted to go toe-to-toe with, Jonathan Lethem, huh?
"Eat S*it"... "go F#*+K yourself" ...."Thehorrorthehorror" .....
and "Icouldabeenacontender!" is endearing in the most pure *Zen-in-the city*!
Wonderful reviews here on GR's that came before me!!!
April 18, 2023
Ziggedy Zendoodah!
This rip-roaring take on the classic detective story features an unlikely hero - a gumshoe with Tourette's syndrome. Lionel Essrog, AKA - 'The Human Freakshow' is an intellectually sensitive type, with a bad case of Tourette's. Bristling with odd habits and compulsions, his mind continuously revolting against him in lurid outbursts of strange verbiage. He is compelled to snap, count, bark, grunt, tap and make strange Vocalizations at inopportune moments, sometimes even with a gun stuffed in his face. Lethem makes Essrog's Tourette's brain virtually a character in it's self, as Essrog describes, with almost parental solicitude, the origins and mechanisms of his tics. Essrog is one of the 'Minna Men', one four Brooklyn orphans adopted from St. Vincent's Home for Boys by Frank Minna, their limo service/detective agency boss who ends up bleeding to death in a dumpster. Lionel gets to work to try and solve the mystery of his murder, and has a run in with some unwelcoming and bizarre characters along the way.
Lethem's plot is crackerjack detective material, featuring a few predictable turns now and then, but what absolutely makes it feel original and thoroughly enjoyable; what sets it apart from other gumshoe novels, is all down to Essrog. It must have been so much fun for Lethem writing of his central character. There are the Mafiosi type, an evil Japanese corporation lurking in the shadows, and a love interest as part of the set-up. In terms of genre, it plays out like a fusion of postmodern fiction and classic crime caper. There is a chandler-esque attention to social nuances that jostles with a giddy cartoon comedy, so it does have some originality to an extent. Lethem uses the set pieces and dialogue deftly, and pulls off most of Essrog's narrative voice with aplomb. And it's in such parodies of the detective novel set piece that Lethem signals his fondness for the genre with a prickly ambivalence. Clearly, he's a fan, but one who tries to recognize its weariness after all these years and goes about adding something different.
Lethem produces a rambling detective who stumbles gracefully upon solutions rather than rooting them out. In Motherless Brooklyn solving the crime is kind of beside the point. Instead, this is a novel about the mysteries of consciousness, the dualism Essrog alludes to when he talks about his Tourette's brain as if it were an entity apart from him. In a brief poetic interlude, he muses, ''In Tourette dreams you shed your tics . . . or your tics shed you." Essrog is no doubt a character you truly get behind and root for. He makes you laugh, he makes you sigh. But most of all is the fact that Lethem gives him a big heart. He truly cares. It's not all about the pay cheque.
Another thing Lethem gets spot on is the novels setting, Brooklyn. He really captures the area in the finest of details. This had me thinking of Paul Auster's New York set novels. But this, as a whole, read less like Auster, and more like a cross between Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice and a modern day Raymond Chandler in a lighter mood. Having read a lot of same old same old detective novels in my younger days, this really was a breath of fresh air and an absolute pleasure to read!
April 2, 2016
“Tourette's is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain---same thing) appoints me it, again and again. So I tag back. Can it do otherwise? If you've ever been it you know the answer.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
A kinda egg-sandwich surprise, hardboilded detective novel. I'm still a bit unsure of what exactly was all tossed in (is that lemongrass?). Zen masters? Check. Tourette's? Check. Man-crushes and awkward touches? Check check. Prince (or the Artist Formerly Known AS Prince)? Also, check check checkaramadingdong.
Look fair weather readers, I like Lethem (see four stars...I couldn't stop at three), just like I like Chabon. Actually, almost exactly like I like Chabon. There is a certain dance, jig, and Brooklyn-hipster style to both their writing, complete with their shared fetishes (comic books, vinyl chairs, bad hair, crappy cars, carnival food, odd screwballs).
They seem to be barycentric binaries or orbs ORBiting the same point in space; two prose vultures circling the same diseased zip code of literary space-time. So, yes, I enjoyed it. But also felt like I was robbed a bit, like a bit of the potential for this novel got skimmed off into some dark, back-room, and I was left holding less than a royal flush. I was treated to a comic when I wanted a novel, a girl when I wanted a woman, a joke when I wanted a koan.
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
A kinda egg-sandwich surprise, hardboilded detective novel. I'm still a bit unsure of what exactly was all tossed in (is that lemongrass?). Zen masters? Check. Tourette's? Check. Man-crushes and awkward touches? Check check. Prince (or the Artist Formerly Known AS Prince)? Also, check check checkaramadingdong.
Look fair weather readers, I like Lethem (see four stars...I couldn't stop at three), just like I like Chabon. Actually, almost exactly like I like Chabon. There is a certain dance, jig, and Brooklyn-hipster style to both their writing, complete with their shared fetishes (comic books, vinyl chairs, bad hair, crappy cars, carnival food, odd screwballs).
They seem to be barycentric binaries or orbs ORBiting the same point in space; two prose vultures circling the same diseased zip code of literary space-time. So, yes, I enjoyed it. But also felt like I was robbed a bit, like a bit of the potential for this novel got skimmed off into some dark, back-room, and I was left holding less than a royal flush. I was treated to a comic when I wanted a novel, a girl when I wanted a woman, a joke when I wanted a koan.
March 9, 2020
Well, shoot. Despite the many 4 and 5 star reviews from my GR buddies, I failed to get a grip with this one. At first the ticcing, touching, tapping, mirroring, and counting by Lionel Essrog (aka Freakshow) was entertaining and funny. But soon, it became tiresome and repetitive to me. And then I felt bad, because I could make it stop it by putting the book aside, a resolution that was not available to Lionel. There is some clever writing in here, and a scene set in a Japanese restaurant that is hilarious. But all in all, it was just a poor fit for me.
August 31, 2017
Have you read Motherless Brooklyn yet? If not, what are you waiting for? I mean, sure, the idea of an orphaned private detective with Tourette's Syndrome sounded a little strange to me too, possibly even depressing, but as it turns out this novel is anything but depressing. It's hilarious! And exciting! The book begins with a car chase, which is exactly the sort of thing that seems like a terrible idea to me, but I was riveted and that feeling didn't let up. The aforementioned orphaned detective is one of the best characters I can ever remember encountering in any novel anywhere. I really want to read more of Jonathan Lethem's books now, but I don't see how even he could live up to the high bar he's set here. In any event, I'm happy I finally read this one now. Definitely in my top 3 for 2017 so far, and possibly in my top 10 novels of all time. Yay Motherless Brooklyn!
March 7, 2016
There are more laugh out loud moments in this novel than in anything I’ve read for ages. Lionel, the orphaned aspiring detective with Tourettes is an adorable character. (Lethem helps us understand that we all have Tourettes to some extent: "Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.”) The prose is consistently dazzling – often making you see the familiar with a fresh enlightening dew on it – and the plot is gripping from the word go. What’s not to like?
December 15, 2009
Way too gimmicky! About Motherless Brooklyn Newsday calls Jonathan Lethem "one of the most original voices among younger American novelists;" while Entertainment Weekly describes him as "one of our most inventive, stylish and sensous writers." I strongly disagree. I think these organiztions have confused originality with gimmickry.
Goodreads interviewed Jonathan Lethem in their November newsletter. I'd never heard of him. I checked out a couple of his books at the library, one for me, one for my wife, with the idea that we'd trade. That trade never happened; neither of us liked what we read. I even picked the one whose dustcover summary seemed most interesting. New York detective agency, members killed, Brooklyn underworld, hitmen, mob funding, Japanese profiteers.
Lethem attempts something in Motherless Brooklyn that seems very original. His main character has Tourette's syndrome, with a comorbidity of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). His Tourette's causes him to choke, rhyme, stutter, invent, and swear through words, while his OCD causes some minor ritualistic touching and balancing of his environment. It's through this character's perspective that we quickly cruise through 311 pages.
After a few chapters the novelty of storytelling through Tourette's syndrome become overworked. The vocal tics aren't heavy-handed and don't obstruct the flow, but it becomes routine and predictable. Lethem doesn't experiment with Tourette's. Instead, it's the same rhyming and kluging together of 'hot' words the character, Lionel, can't get out of his head. We learn (a little) what it's like to have Tourette's, and perhaps it was Lethem's intent to hammer the same vocal repititions to prove the insidiousness of Tourettes, but in the end, Lionel is a very flat, predictable, and unsympathetic character.
Here's a list where I think gimmickry replaces originality. Remember, any 2 or 3 or 4 of these options together, though highly stereotyped already in the detective genre, could make a run at a good novel. But here, in Motherless Brooklyn, all the stereotypes are piled together in clichéd suffocation. It's as if Lethem handled too many ingredients, causing a gallimaufry of overused tastes, smells, and sights.
- The 'hook' is a double murder, both agents in a small detective agency
- Immediate confusion and suspicion among the agents
- Dead man's wife leaves town in a hurry
- All agents grew up together in an inner-city orphanage, hence the title 'motherless'
- As kids, they start working for the mob
- The oldest orphan marries a beautiful woman, becomes leader, acts as father figure
- Maffia represented by 2 stereotyped old Italian gangsters, always meeting in the same safehouse
- There's a Russian hitman, physically enormous, dumb, and has no speaking parts
- A zen budhist school seems to be a front to something illegal
- The detective agency seems to be a front to something illegal
- Lead character falls in love with a zen student
- Zen student inbetween boyfriends, but has experience dating Tourette's
- Most action takes place at night
- Tough black cop from Harlem
- Surveillence, from a car, from foot
- Tie to crooked Japanese businessmen
- Throughout there's a description of New York City's tough underbelly
- Interstate car chase
- In hostility bullets fired
- Escape
- Beautiful woman suddenly reappears
- Car crash
- Gunpoint
- Unsuspected appearance of long lost brother
- Clues build until the end
- Climax is what you expected, but with an obligatory minor twist
Apart from the formula above, I didn't really think the writing was all that inspired; there was not enough background to empathize with any of the characters; the connections in the plot weren't put together as if there was an overarching vision--they were frayed as if Lethem just began writing one day and suddenly ended up with a book that should have been combed by a better set of publishers; and the climax seemed rushed and tenuous. USA Today called this book 'hugely ambitious'. I would call it hugely overrated.
No new words from this book.
Goodreads interviewed Jonathan Lethem in their November newsletter. I'd never heard of him. I checked out a couple of his books at the library, one for me, one for my wife, with the idea that we'd trade. That trade never happened; neither of us liked what we read. I even picked the one whose dustcover summary seemed most interesting. New York detective agency, members killed, Brooklyn underworld, hitmen, mob funding, Japanese profiteers.
Lethem attempts something in Motherless Brooklyn that seems very original. His main character has Tourette's syndrome, with a comorbidity of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). His Tourette's causes him to choke, rhyme, stutter, invent, and swear through words, while his OCD causes some minor ritualistic touching and balancing of his environment. It's through this character's perspective that we quickly cruise through 311 pages.
After a few chapters the novelty of storytelling through Tourette's syndrome become overworked. The vocal tics aren't heavy-handed and don't obstruct the flow, but it becomes routine and predictable. Lethem doesn't experiment with Tourette's. Instead, it's the same rhyming and kluging together of 'hot' words the character, Lionel, can't get out of his head. We learn (a little) what it's like to have Tourette's, and perhaps it was Lethem's intent to hammer the same vocal repititions to prove the insidiousness of Tourettes, but in the end, Lionel is a very flat, predictable, and unsympathetic character.
Here's a list where I think gimmickry replaces originality. Remember, any 2 or 3 or 4 of these options together, though highly stereotyped already in the detective genre, could make a run at a good novel. But here, in Motherless Brooklyn, all the stereotypes are piled together in clichéd suffocation. It's as if Lethem handled too many ingredients, causing a gallimaufry of overused tastes, smells, and sights.
- The 'hook' is a double murder, both agents in a small detective agency
- Immediate confusion and suspicion among the agents
- Dead man's wife leaves town in a hurry
- All agents grew up together in an inner-city orphanage, hence the title 'motherless'
- As kids, they start working for the mob
- The oldest orphan marries a beautiful woman, becomes leader, acts as father figure
- Maffia represented by 2 stereotyped old Italian gangsters, always meeting in the same safehouse
- There's a Russian hitman, physically enormous, dumb, and has no speaking parts
- A zen budhist school seems to be a front to something illegal
- The detective agency seems to be a front to something illegal
- Lead character falls in love with a zen student
- Zen student inbetween boyfriends, but has experience dating Tourette's
- Most action takes place at night
- Tough black cop from Harlem
- Surveillence, from a car, from foot
- Tie to crooked Japanese businessmen
- Throughout there's a description of New York City's tough underbelly
- Interstate car chase
- In hostility bullets fired
- Escape
- Beautiful woman suddenly reappears
- Car crash
- Gunpoint
- Unsuspected appearance of long lost brother
- Clues build until the end
- Climax is what you expected, but with an obligatory minor twist
Apart from the formula above, I didn't really think the writing was all that inspired; there was not enough background to empathize with any of the characters; the connections in the plot weren't put together as if there was an overarching vision--they were frayed as if Lethem just began writing one day and suddenly ended up with a book that should have been combed by a better set of publishers; and the climax seemed rushed and tenuous. USA Today called this book 'hugely ambitious'. I would call it hugely overrated.
No new words from this book.
December 4, 2013
Frank Minna was a small fish in a big city pond full of piranhas and scum. He was nimble, though; good with angles. His best move was when he recruited four young guys from the local orphanage, before they were old enough to shave, to be errand boys. These young bucks were eager, loyal assistants that somebody dubbed Motherless Brooklyn. Frank treated them to bigger boy delights like twenty dollar bills and bottles of beer for their efforts, and they just stayed on staff as they got older and more useful. They were not typically involved in anything all that bad, but an element of shadiness did exist – under-the-table, dark-alley, undercover kind of stuff.
The most memorable character from a cast chock full of them was Lionel Essrog. He was the biggest and lumpiest of Frank’s boys. Beyond Lionel’s bruiser/enforcer looks was the fact that he had Tourette’s. He always made Frank laugh with his verbal tics and twitchiness. It’s gratifying to find, though, that Lionel is not entirely defined by his condition. He had a hale and hearty interior life just below the surface.
As the fast-paced storyline develops, Lionel and a colleague witness a terrible, unexplained act perpetrated against Frank. Each of the boys, now Minna “Men”, reacts in a different way, mostly grabbing for power and prestige while trying to appear helpful. Lionel is the one most willing and able to actually figure things out. He proves to be surprisingly effective at gathering information and piecing together clues, all the while navigating his way through the Tourettic minefield. The inner workings of the guy’s mind were fascinating to see.
This is one of those books that arbiters of such things would call a genre buster. It certainly works as a mystery/action/crime/thriller. But it has legitimate lit cred, too. It won some national book critics’ award, after all. I liked the mix, but then I’m the kind of guy who’d have no trouble washing a deep-dish pizza down with a fine Barolo wine.
Something else a real reviewer would say, I’m sure, is that the place is a character, too. Lethem did a great job of bringing Brooklyn alive. Maybe he was helped by the fact that we’ve seen so much of urban jungle life in movies, but I had a clear picture in my head of the surroundings each step of the way.
All in all, it’s a fast and enjoyable read, with a different kind of protagonist to pull for. A solid 4 stars.
The most memorable character from a cast chock full of them was Lionel Essrog. He was the biggest and lumpiest of Frank’s boys. Beyond Lionel’s bruiser/enforcer looks was the fact that he had Tourette’s. He always made Frank laugh with his verbal tics and twitchiness. It’s gratifying to find, though, that Lionel is not entirely defined by his condition. He had a hale and hearty interior life just below the surface.
As the fast-paced storyline develops, Lionel and a colleague witness a terrible, unexplained act perpetrated against Frank. Each of the boys, now Minna “Men”, reacts in a different way, mostly grabbing for power and prestige while trying to appear helpful. Lionel is the one most willing and able to actually figure things out. He proves to be surprisingly effective at gathering information and piecing together clues, all the while navigating his way through the Tourettic minefield. The inner workings of the guy’s mind were fascinating to see.
This is one of those books that arbiters of such things would call a genre buster. It certainly works as a mystery/action/crime/thriller. But it has legitimate lit cred, too. It won some national book critics’ award, after all. I liked the mix, but then I’m the kind of guy who’d have no trouble washing a deep-dish pizza down with a fine Barolo wine.
Something else a real reviewer would say, I’m sure, is that the place is a character, too. Lethem did a great job of bringing Brooklyn alive. Maybe he was helped by the fact that we’ve seen so much of urban jungle life in movies, but I had a clear picture in my head of the surroundings each step of the way.
All in all, it’s a fast and enjoyable read, with a different kind of protagonist to pull for. A solid 4 stars.
February 10, 2017
“Prince's music calmed me as much as masturbation or a cheeseburger.”
Lionel Essrog, protagonist in Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn
Lethem's 1999 literary detective novel set in Brooklyn was a fun read, much more layered and satisfying than the hard-boiled detective novels. The protagonist Lionel Essrog grew up an orphan and was nicknamed "The Human Freakshow" due to his Tourette syndrome. In lesser hands, these verbal tics could have turned gimmicky, but here Lethem fully develops Essrog and makes the reader care about him.
Essrog is working for Frank Minna, who has some mob connections and owns a "seedy," "makeshift" detective agency (a front for two-bit organized crime), when Minna is murdered by stabbing. Essrog's suspenseful journey investigating and solving the crime is always intelligent and often risible.
Lionel Essrog, protagonist in Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn
Lethem's 1999 literary detective novel set in Brooklyn was a fun read, much more layered and satisfying than the hard-boiled detective novels. The protagonist Lionel Essrog grew up an orphan and was nicknamed "The Human Freakshow" due to his Tourette syndrome. In lesser hands, these verbal tics could have turned gimmicky, but here Lethem fully develops Essrog and makes the reader care about him.
Essrog is working for Frank Minna, who has some mob connections and owns a "seedy," "makeshift" detective agency (a front for two-bit organized crime), when Minna is murdered by stabbing. Essrog's suspenseful journey investigating and solving the crime is always intelligent and often risible.
August 18, 2009
Maybe I've just been lucky picking out some incredible books lately, but I feel like a lot of them are "my new favorite", or "one of the best I've read this year", but I really have to say it again for Motherless Brooklyn. Lethem's writing style had me from the beginning, and the story, being told from the perspective of Lionel Essrog, a man with Tourette's Syndrome was fascinating. It reads like a mystery/detective novel, but really, it's so much more than that.
Also, it was just one of those books that I could identify with on a somewhat personal level. Even though my son is autistic, and doesn't have Tourette's, there were some similiarites that really hit home. It kind of opened my eyes to why he was echolaliac. I mean for awhile, before speech therapy, the only words my son Treston would say would be words just spoken to him. I've always just been curious as to why he has to come and tap me five times on my knee or shoulder before trying to communicate. Reading this book kind of gave me an inside look at why these things happen, since I've always just wanted to ask Treston what he's thinking, but at the same time, knowing he's not able to answer me. Lionel's story just put these characteristics into more real-life situations, and not just textbook answers. It kind of gave me hope that Treston can have a somewhat "normal" life (not that I want him to become a Minna Man or anything), but when he gets older he will be able to have friends and relationships--even if they're dysfunctional, but really, who doesn't have some of those?
Wow, I know that's a lot to take from a so-called detective novel, but really, it's that good. I highly recommend this one!
Also, it was just one of those books that I could identify with on a somewhat personal level. Even though my son is autistic, and doesn't have Tourette's, there were some similiarites that really hit home. It kind of opened my eyes to why he was echolaliac. I mean for awhile, before speech therapy, the only words my son Treston would say would be words just spoken to him. I've always just been curious as to why he has to come and tap me five times on my knee or shoulder before trying to communicate. Reading this book kind of gave me an inside look at why these things happen, since I've always just wanted to ask Treston what he's thinking, but at the same time, knowing he's not able to answer me. Lionel's story just put these characteristics into more real-life situations, and not just textbook answers. It kind of gave me hope that Treston can have a somewhat "normal" life (not that I want him to become a Minna Man or anything), but when he gets older he will be able to have friends and relationships--even if they're dysfunctional, but really, who doesn't have some of those?
Wow, I know that's a lot to take from a so-called detective novel, but really, it's that good. I highly recommend this one!
March 16, 2021
The Manic Choreography of a Motherless Brooklyn Boy
In 1979, Frank Minna plucked Lionel Essrog and three fellow orphans from St Vincent's Home for Boys in downtown Brooklyn, and fashioned them all into a workforce for a car service business and then a private detective agency. They call themselves the Minna Men.
Lionel has Tourette's syndrome. His tics include a kind of word association that is, at times, either amusing or insightful. This is how Lionel explains it:
Like “notes in a melody", it sometimes sounds like scat or jazz improvisation (although the soundtrack of the novel consists of Prince rather than bebop). However, over the course of the novel, it evidences Lionel building a complete language with which to investigate and understand the outside world. It's put to greatest effect, when Frank is murdered, and Lionel decides that, deprived of his mentor, he must “probably, gobbledy” be the one to find the killer.
Paltry Clues
Lionel is the first person narrator, so we get his carefully composed side of the story. I don't know enough about Tourette's to appreciate whether his affliction is accurately portrayed. He rarely seems to be frustrated by it. He always gets to achieve what he sets out to do (including finding the killer).
The clues are “paltry". Readers mightn't appreciate the significance of at least one of them (the Irving joke, “if Irving really was a clue”) until the second last chapter, in which Lionel solves the crime.
Words are a scaffold, “a way of touching the world, handling it, covering it with confirming language.” Words make the world tangible. You can use them to grasp, to identify, to differentiate, to highlight, to appreciate, to love and adore.
The Film
A few words about the film: I saw it when I still had six pages of the novel to read. However, by then, I was aware that the plots differed substantially.
The back story in the film (and hence the time setting) has nothing to do with the novel, and appears to be the creation of Edward Norton (based on a long term interest in the corrupt public planning official, Robert Moses), who is extensively discussed in the fifth essay/section of Marshall Berman's book, "All That is Solid Melts into Air".
The Four Doormen and the Apocalypse
Norton seems to have balked at documenting the very different small time mobsterism, crime and corruption in the novel, not to mention the love interest in the two female characters, Julia and Kimmery (the former of whom barely features in the film, while the latter of whom is omitted from the film altogether, in favour of Laura Rose).
Whereas the film is set in the fifties, the novel flits between the Buddhist spiritualism of the hippie sixties and seventies, and the corrupt Manhattan materialism of the late post-me-decade nineties. The chapters dealing with the two women reminded me of the counter-culture idealism and Utopianism of Richard Brautigan. The later chapters hinted of Paul Auster in tone. Overall, the novel is very much the work of Jonathan Lethem, even if he borrows heavily from pulp and noir fiction.
VERSE:
The Girl from Nantucket
(For Julia)
There once was a girl from Nantucket
Whose dad kept his cash in a bucket
When her father succumbed,
Nan looked after her mum,
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
Final Eggnog in the Universe (Fujisaki Alibi Sacrifice)
Place of peace plate of peas piece of pie
Fountain mountain range strange
Clown frown downtown brownstone
Tracey bass baseball clay play golf roll
Ball fall call crawl drawl droll doll
Rough tough touch much such clutch
Best rest test toot zoot suit double breast
Tic tac tap trap rap rip hat trick zip me up
Bra bar tar car par star far near east
Hot tub club rub rubble double trouble
Hero hiero glyph squiggle prince kiss
Dance stance truck pluck fuck a duck
Fun run runt blunt gun flood blood shot
Tree flee fly away disperse desist resist arrest.
SOUNDTRACK:
In 1979, Frank Minna plucked Lionel Essrog and three fellow orphans from St Vincent's Home for Boys in downtown Brooklyn, and fashioned them all into a workforce for a car service business and then a private detective agency. They call themselves the Minna Men.
Lionel has Tourette's syndrome. His tics include a kind of word association that is, at times, either amusing or insightful. This is how Lionel explains it:
“Though I collected words, treasured them like a drooling sadistic captor, bending them, melting them down, filing off their edges, stacking them into teetering piles, before release I translated them into physical performance, manic choreography.”
Like “notes in a melody", it sometimes sounds like scat or jazz improvisation (although the soundtrack of the novel consists of Prince rather than bebop). However, over the course of the novel, it evidences Lionel building a complete language with which to investigate and understand the outside world. It's put to greatest effect, when Frank is murdered, and Lionel decides that, deprived of his mentor, he must “probably, gobbledy” be the one to find the killer.
Paltry Clues
Lionel is the first person narrator, so we get his carefully composed side of the story. I don't know enough about Tourette's to appreciate whether his affliction is accurately portrayed. He rarely seems to be frustrated by it. He always gets to achieve what he sets out to do (including finding the killer).
The clues are “paltry". Readers mightn't appreciate the significance of at least one of them (the Irving joke, “if Irving really was a clue”) until the second last chapter, in which Lionel solves the crime.
Words are a scaffold, “a way of touching the world, handling it, covering it with confirming language.” Words make the world tangible. You can use them to grasp, to identify, to differentiate, to highlight, to appreciate, to love and adore.
The Film
A few words about the film: I saw it when I still had six pages of the novel to read. However, by then, I was aware that the plots differed substantially.
The back story in the film (and hence the time setting) has nothing to do with the novel, and appears to be the creation of Edward Norton (based on a long term interest in the corrupt public planning official, Robert Moses), who is extensively discussed in the fifth essay/section of Marshall Berman's book, "All That is Solid Melts into Air".
The Four Doormen and the Apocalypse
Norton seems to have balked at documenting the very different small time mobsterism, crime and corruption in the novel, not to mention the love interest in the two female characters, Julia and Kimmery (the former of whom barely features in the film, while the latter of whom is omitted from the film altogether, in favour of Laura Rose).
Whereas the film is set in the fifties, the novel flits between the Buddhist spiritualism of the hippie sixties and seventies, and the corrupt Manhattan materialism of the late post-me-decade nineties. The chapters dealing with the two women reminded me of the counter-culture idealism and Utopianism of Richard Brautigan. The later chapters hinted of Paul Auster in tone. Overall, the novel is very much the work of Jonathan Lethem, even if he borrows heavily from pulp and noir fiction.
VERSE:
The Girl from Nantucket
(For Julia)
There once was a girl from Nantucket
Whose dad kept his cash in a bucket
When her father succumbed,
Nan looked after her mum,
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
Final Eggnog in the Universe (Fujisaki Alibi Sacrifice)
Place of peace plate of peas piece of pie
Fountain mountain range strange
Clown frown downtown brownstone
Tracey bass baseball clay play golf roll
Ball fall call crawl drawl droll doll
Rough tough touch much such clutch
Best rest test toot zoot suit double breast
Tic tac tap trap rap rip hat trick zip me up
Bra bar tar car par star far near east
Hot tub club rub rubble double trouble
Hero hiero glyph squiggle prince kiss
Dance stance truck pluck fuck a duck
Fun run runt blunt gun flood blood shot
Tree flee fly away disperse desist resist arrest.
SOUNDTRACK:
December 11, 2019
My favourite novel of the year.
Lionel Essrog is a loveable orphan who has Tourette's. He and three of his fellow orphans are taken under the wing of Frank Minna, a small-time hustler with mob connections. Lionel hero worships the sharply dressed smooth talking Frank. Eventually Frank sets up a detective agency but something very bad happens to him and Lionel has to discover who did it.
This is a novel that ticks all the boxes. It's full of suspense, rife with great plot twists, fabulously written, often laugh-out-loud funny and Lionel is without question the most memorable character I've encountered all year.
Lionel Essrog is a loveable orphan who has Tourette's. He and three of his fellow orphans are taken under the wing of Frank Minna, a small-time hustler with mob connections. Lionel hero worships the sharply dressed smooth talking Frank. Eventually Frank sets up a detective agency but something very bad happens to him and Lionel has to discover who did it.
This is a novel that ticks all the boxes. It's full of suspense, rife with great plot twists, fabulously written, often laugh-out-loud funny and Lionel is without question the most memorable character I've encountered all year.
June 5, 2017
Lethem is a master at hip, funny, serious, genre mash-up fiction, and this (IMHO) is his best so far. It's a soft-hearted, hard-boiled, Zen-infused, satirical noir, narrated by a small-time detective with Tourette's. Thankfully this doesn't come across as gimmicky, which it would in less capable hands. The narrator, Lionel Essrog (now there's a Pynchonesque name), uses his condition to think about, well, language itself, as his outbursts often riff on what they're supposed to convey. Sure, the plot itself is pretty formulaic, but that's the point--these characters are trapped in their own genre conventions just as Essrog is trapped in his linguistic ones, which gives his outbursts a heightened sense of liberation and freedom.
November 14, 2022
3 Stars for Motherless Brooklyn (audiobook) by Jonathan Lethem read by Geoffrey Cantor.
I think this could have been at least a 4 star book for me if it had been half as long. Listening to 10 hours of Tourette’s is a bit much.
I think this could have been at least a 4 star book for me if it had been half as long. Listening to 10 hours of Tourette’s is a bit much.
January 30, 2020
Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/
3.5 Stars
Motherless Brooklyn is told from Lionel Essrog’s perspective. An orphan residing in the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys in Brooklyn, Essrog and a handful of others ranging from 13-15 are picked up by local hood Frank Minna as day workers for his local “delivery company.” Fast-forward 15 years and those same boys are assistants for Minna’s “detective agency” . . . . . and Minna is dead. What follows is Lionel’s attempt to discover the whodunit.
I have absolutely zero recollection of how this got added to my TBR. All I know is the library had one copy so I have been waiting on it for months and months. During that time I discovered it had been adapted into a feature film with an all-star cast. I can’t imagine anyone better than Edward Norton being the one to declare this novel a labor of love and not rest until Essrog was brought to life on the big screen. He’s a narrator like you’re never seen and deserves to be portrayed by an actor with Norton’s capabilities. Why, you ask? Since I didn’t mention it before, it’s due to the fact that Lionel Essrog suffers from a severe case of Tourette’s syndrome. And that’s the whole reason this book works. The “mystery” is one of not only the meh variety, but also one that is all but solved and explained to the reader by pretty much the 60% mark – and there’s a completely unnecessary romantic interest thrown in to muddy up the waters. Heck, the entire thing gets a little bit lost in itself. Although a specific timeframe is never provided, readers must assume the story takes place roughly in the 90s (some people have cell phones that fit in their pockets, but also still beepers and landlines and drive cars like Mercury Tracers). However, the actions/exchanges of the characters along with the noir style of delivery tricks the brain into believing it to be taking place decades ago. (Apparently the film has fixed this glitch and has the story taking place in the ‘50s.) Lionel compares some of his tics to the acting style of Art Carney and he and the other Minna Men are told they look like rejects from Welcome Back Kotter – it’s just odd. But Lionel Essrog himself? He’s perfection.
“I’d appreciate hearing from you—Doorjerk! Doorjam! Jerkdom!—if you see anything odd.”
“You’re pretty odd,” he said seriously.
“Something besides me.”
He’s the quintessential loveable loser. Not only due to having a very in-your-face medical condition during a time when people weren’t familiar with it and instead simply assumed him to be “the Freakshow,” but also due to his naiveté and loyalty to a boss he truly believed to be a legitimate businessman. With the recent backlash regarding authors who choose to write tales that are not their personal story to tell, I’m certainly glad Lethem is an author who was not censored simply for the fact that he himself does not have Tourette’s.
Look, Ma – no .gifs!
3.5 Stars
Motherless Brooklyn is told from Lionel Essrog’s perspective. An orphan residing in the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys in Brooklyn, Essrog and a handful of others ranging from 13-15 are picked up by local hood Frank Minna as day workers for his local “delivery company.” Fast-forward 15 years and those same boys are assistants for Minna’s “detective agency” . . . . . and Minna is dead. What follows is Lionel’s attempt to discover the whodunit.
I have absolutely zero recollection of how this got added to my TBR. All I know is the library had one copy so I have been waiting on it for months and months. During that time I discovered it had been adapted into a feature film with an all-star cast. I can’t imagine anyone better than Edward Norton being the one to declare this novel a labor of love and not rest until Essrog was brought to life on the big screen. He’s a narrator like you’re never seen and deserves to be portrayed by an actor with Norton’s capabilities. Why, you ask? Since I didn’t mention it before, it’s due to the fact that Lionel Essrog suffers from a severe case of Tourette’s syndrome. And that’s the whole reason this book works. The “mystery” is one of not only the meh variety, but also one that is all but solved and explained to the reader by pretty much the 60% mark – and there’s a completely unnecessary romantic interest thrown in to muddy up the waters. Heck, the entire thing gets a little bit lost in itself. Although a specific timeframe is never provided, readers must assume the story takes place roughly in the 90s (some people have cell phones that fit in their pockets, but also still beepers and landlines and drive cars like Mercury Tracers). However, the actions/exchanges of the characters along with the noir style of delivery tricks the brain into believing it to be taking place decades ago. (Apparently the film has fixed this glitch and has the story taking place in the ‘50s.) Lionel compares some of his tics to the acting style of Art Carney and he and the other Minna Men are told they look like rejects from Welcome Back Kotter – it’s just odd. But Lionel Essrog himself? He’s perfection.
“I’d appreciate hearing from you—Doorjerk! Doorjam! Jerkdom!—if you see anything odd.”
“You’re pretty odd,” he said seriously.
“Something besides me.”
He’s the quintessential loveable loser. Not only due to having a very in-your-face medical condition during a time when people weren’t familiar with it and instead simply assumed him to be “the Freakshow,” but also due to his naiveté and loyalty to a boss he truly believed to be a legitimate businessman. With the recent backlash regarding authors who choose to write tales that are not their personal story to tell, I’m certainly glad Lethem is an author who was not censored simply for the fact that he himself does not have Tourette’s.
Look, Ma – no .gifs!
January 6, 2016
Video-review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-uWL...
#3 in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIWkw...
Long story short: possibly the best detective novel ever written, certainly one of the best novels of the last twenty years. A beautifully orchestrated hard-boliled story that smells of pavement, incense and White Castle burgers, one that manages to be mercilessly real, breath-takingly beautiful and deeply deeply emotional. And don't make me start on the narrator because that's pure genius.
#3 in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIWkw...
Long story short: possibly the best detective novel ever written, certainly one of the best novels of the last twenty years. A beautifully orchestrated hard-boliled story that smells of pavement, incense and White Castle burgers, one that manages to be mercilessly real, breath-takingly beautiful and deeply deeply emotional. And don't make me start on the narrator because that's pure genius.
November 28, 2019
3.5 Stars
What a unique interpretation of a mystery novel featuring an amateur detective with Tourettes.
Lionel Essorg grew up in St Vincent's Home for orphans and quickly gets in with a group of Italian guys, with Frank Minna playing the father figure. Frank has a car service company and a secret detective agency within. Frank unexpectedly gets stabbed and that leaves the misfit pack of orphans to figure out what happened. Lionel is such a well drawn character, and one you want to root for. I truly enjoyed reading this novel from his perspective. I had some minor issues with the story, but overall this one stands the test of time, it was originally published in the 1990's and it was fun to live during that timeframe in Brooklyn. Solving crime without technology is always something that interests me.
Overall, a well written novel with wonderfully developed characters, flaws and all. One you could certainly revisit again and would make for some good discussion. Now, I can see the movie.
What a unique interpretation of a mystery novel featuring an amateur detective with Tourettes.
Lionel Essorg grew up in St Vincent's Home for orphans and quickly gets in with a group of Italian guys, with Frank Minna playing the father figure. Frank has a car service company and a secret detective agency within. Frank unexpectedly gets stabbed and that leaves the misfit pack of orphans to figure out what happened. Lionel is such a well drawn character, and one you want to root for. I truly enjoyed reading this novel from his perspective. I had some minor issues with the story, but overall this one stands the test of time, it was originally published in the 1990's and it was fun to live during that timeframe in Brooklyn. Solving crime without technology is always something that interests me.
Overall, a well written novel with wonderfully developed characters, flaws and all. One you could certainly revisit again and would make for some good discussion. Now, I can see the movie.
October 25, 2021
Read the novel, watched the film. Edward Norton’s long-brewed adaptation has a more interesting plot than Lethem’s, replacing the farcical intrigue with Japanese oligarchs and practitioners of Buddhist zazen meditation with a more narratively meaty tale of infrastructural racism based on the urban planning and slum-clearances of Robert Moses. Lethem’s novel is more hardboiled, nastier and scuzzier than Norton’s occasionally breezy throwback noir, with the protagonist Lionel more browbeaten, outcast, and pitiful than the pretty putz in the flick. As novel-to-screen collaborations fare, these two work in heavenly sync, serving up two very unique creations that straddle their zeitgeists nimbly.
September 3, 2014
I'd always planned on really loving this book, not sure why or how that started but it was probably when Fortress of Solitude came out and I really loved that (really loved the first half, anyway) and a bunch of people told me Motherless Brooklyn was even better. It sounded like something I'd like a lot, so I've tried every few years since then but could never make it in past the beginning. This time, though, I did, and read the whole thing pretty quickly and without too much groaning or whining or carrying on.
I feel unkind giving this two stars and thought about three, but my ratings don't pretend to be fair and I dock a point for disappointed expectations. This book wasn't unpleasant to read but I just didn't get the pleasure from it that most people seem to, that I'd planned in advance for myself. The descriptions of Carroll Gardens and other locations were good, and Lionel Essrog was a reasonably sympathetic, interesting narrator. However, the Tourette's stuff got old, which I could see was the point, but that didn't make it any less tiresome. It's like the old problem of trying to write about someone being bored without the book being boring: you have to be a genius to pull that off, and for me it didn't happen here. I get how my having to slog through the same redundantly self-reflexive thoughts and predictable actions over and over is supposed to mimic Lionel's own frustration with his disorder, but I didn't feel like it gave me an enhanced view of what having Tourette's might be like; it was just a drag at a certain point, and felt more like authorial shtick than a genuine character's tic.
This all would've totally been fine except that I didn't find the storyline particularly interesting. I didn't care much if he solved the mystery, and when he did there wasn't anything satisfying or particularly compelling about it for me. None of the characters had ever interested me much, so I didn't care if anyone lived or died and wasn't invested in what they'd done in the past or might do next. Nothing in the book surprised me or revealed anything I was excited to know. But I didn't dislike it, and only got severely annoyed with it once (on page 283, when Lethem destroys what's been a great scene by concluding with an infuriating bit of nineties-era pseudo-comedic schlock that makes the whole book seem like a lame sitcom pilot and turns Lionel into a cardboard character complete with a lame catchphrase).
Most other normal warm-blooded human beings love and cherish this book, so clearly there's some part of me that's just dead inside. Counter to my high expectations and best intentions, Motherless Brooklyn and I just didn't really connect, and while it wasn't a bad book at all I didn't especially like it, so my rating stands: "it was ok."
I feel unkind giving this two stars and thought about three, but my ratings don't pretend to be fair and I dock a point for disappointed expectations. This book wasn't unpleasant to read but I just didn't get the pleasure from it that most people seem to, that I'd planned in advance for myself. The descriptions of Carroll Gardens and other locations were good, and Lionel Essrog was a reasonably sympathetic, interesting narrator. However, the Tourette's stuff got old, which I could see was the point, but that didn't make it any less tiresome. It's like the old problem of trying to write about someone being bored without the book being boring: you have to be a genius to pull that off, and for me it didn't happen here. I get how my having to slog through the same redundantly self-reflexive thoughts and predictable actions over and over is supposed to mimic Lionel's own frustration with his disorder, but I didn't feel like it gave me an enhanced view of what having Tourette's might be like; it was just a drag at a certain point, and felt more like authorial shtick than a genuine character's tic.
This all would've totally been fine except that I didn't find the storyline particularly interesting. I didn't care much if he solved the mystery, and when he did there wasn't anything satisfying or particularly compelling about it for me. None of the characters had ever interested me much, so I didn't care if anyone lived or died and wasn't invested in what they'd done in the past or might do next. Nothing in the book surprised me or revealed anything I was excited to know. But I didn't dislike it, and only got severely annoyed with it once (on page 283, when Lethem destroys what's been a great scene by concluding with an infuriating bit of nineties-era pseudo-comedic schlock that makes the whole book seem like a lame sitcom pilot and turns Lionel into a cardboard character complete with a lame catchphrase).
Most other normal warm-blooded human beings love and cherish this book, so clearly there's some part of me that's just dead inside. Counter to my high expectations and best intentions, Motherless Brooklyn and I just didn't really connect, and while it wasn't a bad book at all I didn't especially like it, so my rating stands: "it was ok."
August 6, 2015
And the third time's indeed the charm!
Read previously circa 2000 and again several years later. My first read, at least, was as an audiobook.
This is the tale of four punks and a hood
In Brooklyn, New York, tryin' to make good,
Mommyless orphanage, no Cub Scouts or den--
Instead, Mista Meanor made 'em his men.
Once they're abandoned, the center can't hold;
Our ticcy hero must be bold (or fold).
You follow the thread as the story unspools,
Learning who are the wise guys and who are the fools
And who, the financial wizards of Zen,
And how can our motherless boys become men.
In the midst of the noir and the middle of chaos,
Can the love and sacrifice yet be the stronger force?
Outbursts tics, outcome art, drawing both tears and laughter--
The Shakespeare of Tourette's: Lethem's the crafter!
Why did I burst into song? Motherless Brooklyn isn't considered poetry. Yet it finally occurred to me that's exactly what it is. The author may have studied up on Tourette's syndrome, but the only way he could have written those verbal tics is as though writing poetry.
Look at a sample of what he does with the guy's name alone--Lionel (rhymes with Vinyl) Essrog.
Viable Guessrog
Alibyebye Essmob
--Alibi hullabaloo gullible bellyflop smellafish....
Unreliable Chessgrub
Yessrog
Edgerog, 33, seeks Edge
Laughing Gassrog
Laugh-or-cry Edgelost
Well, you had to be there!
Context is everything.
Before, I gave the book a "3."
So, what changed? If the other reads were audio, that could be part of it. One part that, one part lying fallow, one part reading times three, and one part laughing out loud, lol. Throw in one part read for book club, just in case it was too-intense-to-read-alone. And finally figuring out after the reading was done that it's like a musical, the hero launching, genre as trampoline, not so much into music as into weird haiku-ish poetry and manic stand-up, words for drumbeats. Lemme entertain you.
Lionel Essrog is a mover and a talker, a word and a gesture, a detective and a fool. Lionel Essrog c'est moi.
May 9, 2019
One of my four favorite books written in my adult lifetime--joining Jesus' Son, A Visit from the Goon Squad and A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories.
The writing is extraordinary, and something I aspire to. It's all so vivid, and the details capture little insights about this world and our world every other sentence. Just amazing.
Also, the story was thoroughly captivating--quite the page-turner.
The characters were really wonderful, too. I have to admit that when he introduced the narrator with Tourette's, why first reaction was, "Well that's really interesting, BUT--that's going to get old, really fast." Felt like it might be a gimmick that would wear through quickly. Nope. Fascinating to see the world through his eyes, to live his experience for awhile--and to see so many connections to how other elements of life can be like that.
That's one of the things so mesmerizing about Lethem as a writer--he's not just a great writer, he's a great thinker. He's taking a concept like Tourette's and finding all these other aspects of life with elements like that, giving me a new perspective on them, connections between the most unlikely things, that have always been right there.
had been hearing about this book for years, and not sure why I put it off. I guess I got the impression it was some hipster thing about Brooklyn. Nothing of the sort.
When I approached the end, I started asking for recommendations on social media, and began amassing a pile of Lethem books to read. I feel so lucky to have discovered another master writer still working. I dove right into Chronic City, and loving that, too.
The writing is extraordinary, and something I aspire to. It's all so vivid, and the details capture little insights about this world and our world every other sentence. Just amazing.
Also, the story was thoroughly captivating--quite the page-turner.
The characters were really wonderful, too. I have to admit that when he introduced the narrator with Tourette's, why first reaction was, "Well that's really interesting, BUT--that's going to get old, really fast." Felt like it might be a gimmick that would wear through quickly. Nope. Fascinating to see the world through his eyes, to live his experience for awhile--and to see so many connections to how other elements of life can be like that.
That's one of the things so mesmerizing about Lethem as a writer--he's not just a great writer, he's a great thinker. He's taking a concept like Tourette's and finding all these other aspects of life with elements like that, giving me a new perspective on them, connections between the most unlikely things, that have always been right there.
had been hearing about this book for years, and not sure why I put it off. I guess I got the impression it was some hipster thing about Brooklyn. Nothing of the sort.
When I approached the end, I started asking for recommendations on social media, and began amassing a pile of Lethem books to read. I feel so lucky to have discovered another master writer still working. I dove right into Chronic City, and loving that, too.
October 25, 2019
Completely unexpected good read! Peeking into the mind of someone with Tourette's was fascinating but the rest of the story with its gritty and unsentimental look at the life of a Brooklyn hood was unexpectedly charming and moving at times. The bonus-- a mystery where black and white were often shaded by grays! Glad I read it-- would make an interesting book club read!
November 3, 2012
Is Jonathan Lethem a genius? A virtuoso? (to use the terms used ad naus. in The Loser) I think not. Is Motherless Brooklyn a work of genius? Also no. But that doesn't mean it isn't still awesome.
Lethem's deconstruction of the detective novel is painfully obvious. He fashions his protagonist by stripping him of one of the most recognizable traits of the hard-boiled private eye--laconism. Lionel Essrog doesn't have a way with words; they have their way with him. Every time he questions someone to get information about Frank's death, he runs the risk of his brain making him say something compromising. So that's sort of a new angle. And Lethem's riffs on the tics and fits of Tourette's are usually funny and/or illuminating and very rarely tiresome. I got a word out of it that will probably be useful sometime, too--Zengeance. I guess my definition of it would be a cross between witnessed karma and schadenfreude.
So here's the big question: if Lionel's Tourette's is so unmanageable, so compulsive, than why is the narrative voice relatively free of tics? Nathan says that Lethem is ignoring an industry standard and leaving a lack of unity between Lionel's character and the narrative voice, which is ostensibly supposed to be Lionel's. I read it differently, though. Let's be honest here: do we really want to read a novel that is truly written, through and through, in the voice of someone with Tourette's? It might be interesting, but it would probably be too frazzled and discontinuous to contain all the other elements that Lethem clearly wants his story to contain. More than that: Lethem wants to give Lionel the verbal grace that he deserves, whether his thought-patterns realistically would look like that or not. It's not strange for an author to use a more elevated style than that of his characters, although it may be a little strange to try and pull it off in the first person. This case is less carelessness and more a willful rejection of something that came before, just as Lethem rejects normal detective-novel conventions in favor of something a little more wrinkled and faded.
But here's why this isn't just a genre work, or an anti-genre work:
- Lionel's loss of innocence at finding out the true nature of Frank Minna, as well as the nature of just about every other character in the novel. No hard-boiled protagonist ever has any innocence left by the time we meet him; including this aspect could be read as anti-genre but the deftness and sincerity with which it's handled indicate a book that goes a little further than mere spoof or homage or deconstruction.
- Matricardi and Rockaforte, two aging mobsters that skirt around the edges of the story and never become major characters. These two guys are symbols of a number of things that no longer exist, and seem like characters straight out of one of the more conventional Delillo novels, maybe Underworld. But even though they get very few pages, they get fully realized in those few pages, which is something I feel you won't get from your standard detective novel or detective-novel-parody.
- Frank Minna himself. Hard to elaborate on this one without giving any spoilers, but suffice it to say that though most characters in this novel are more than they seem (not surprising), Minna is both more and less (surprising).
- Lethem never bends over backwards to set up parallels between Tourette's and anything else, beyond doing stuff like describing NY as Tourettic. But it strikes me that Lionel's quest to find Frank's killer mirrors his quest to find a cure, a balm, or treatment for his Tourette's. Both are things that corrupt and decay you from the inside out, things you could devote a lifetime to and never come close to finding the answer.
Is the plot a little predictable? Maybe. The style a little too lightweight? Maybe, but only if you come in expecting real weight. I think Lethem is capable of weight, but it's not on display here. But that turns out to be fine.
And Nathan, the only similarity I catch between Motherless Brooklyn and American Psycho is the mini-essay on Prince (AP has mini-essays on Whitney Houston, Huey Lewis and the News, and Genesis).
Lethem's deconstruction of the detective novel is painfully obvious. He fashions his protagonist by stripping him of one of the most recognizable traits of the hard-boiled private eye--laconism. Lionel Essrog doesn't have a way with words; they have their way with him. Every time he questions someone to get information about Frank's death, he runs the risk of his brain making him say something compromising. So that's sort of a new angle. And Lethem's riffs on the tics and fits of Tourette's are usually funny and/or illuminating and very rarely tiresome. I got a word out of it that will probably be useful sometime, too--Zengeance. I guess my definition of it would be a cross between witnessed karma and schadenfreude.
So here's the big question: if Lionel's Tourette's is so unmanageable, so compulsive, than why is the narrative voice relatively free of tics? Nathan says that Lethem is ignoring an industry standard and leaving a lack of unity between Lionel's character and the narrative voice, which is ostensibly supposed to be Lionel's. I read it differently, though. Let's be honest here: do we really want to read a novel that is truly written, through and through, in the voice of someone with Tourette's? It might be interesting, but it would probably be too frazzled and discontinuous to contain all the other elements that Lethem clearly wants his story to contain. More than that: Lethem wants to give Lionel the verbal grace that he deserves, whether his thought-patterns realistically would look like that or not. It's not strange for an author to use a more elevated style than that of his characters, although it may be a little strange to try and pull it off in the first person. This case is less carelessness and more a willful rejection of something that came before, just as Lethem rejects normal detective-novel conventions in favor of something a little more wrinkled and faded.
But here's why this isn't just a genre work, or an anti-genre work:
- Lionel's loss of innocence at finding out the true nature of Frank Minna, as well as the nature of just about every other character in the novel. No hard-boiled protagonist ever has any innocence left by the time we meet him; including this aspect could be read as anti-genre but the deftness and sincerity with which it's handled indicate a book that goes a little further than mere spoof or homage or deconstruction.
- Matricardi and Rockaforte, two aging mobsters that skirt around the edges of the story and never become major characters. These two guys are symbols of a number of things that no longer exist, and seem like characters straight out of one of the more conventional Delillo novels, maybe Underworld. But even though they get very few pages, they get fully realized in those few pages, which is something I feel you won't get from your standard detective novel or detective-novel-parody.
- Frank Minna himself. Hard to elaborate on this one without giving any spoilers, but suffice it to say that though most characters in this novel are more than they seem (not surprising), Minna is both more and less (surprising).
- Lethem never bends over backwards to set up parallels between Tourette's and anything else, beyond doing stuff like describing NY as Tourettic. But it strikes me that Lionel's quest to find Frank's killer mirrors his quest to find a cure, a balm, or treatment for his Tourette's. Both are things that corrupt and decay you from the inside out, things you could devote a lifetime to and never come close to finding the answer.
Is the plot a little predictable? Maybe. The style a little too lightweight? Maybe, but only if you come in expecting real weight. I think Lethem is capable of weight, but it's not on display here. But that turns out to be fine.
And Nathan, the only similarity I catch between Motherless Brooklyn and American Psycho is the mini-essay on Prince (AP has mini-essays on Whitney Houston, Huey Lewis and the News, and Genesis).
August 6, 2009
Tell me to do it muffin ass …. to rest the lust of a loaftomb! …. Barnamum Pierogi lug!
Meet Lionel Essrog. Viable Guessfrog, Lionel Deathclam, Liable Guesscog, Ironic Pissclam. Lionel is a Minna Man. A full fledged Hardly Boy… A freakshow… A member of Motherless Brooklyn.
I love Lionel. Not in my special groupie way. Hold your hats here; I might be growing as a person. Nah. I just really love Lionel’s brain. Peirogi kumquat sushiphone! Domestic marshmallow ghost! Insatiable Mallomar!
Did I mention Lionel has Tourette’s? I’ve only met one person with Tourette’s and he wasn’t as lyrical as Lionel. He was a neurology resident. He used to yip and scurry down the hall of the hospital. You always knew when he was on the floor. One time I was in the room with him and he squirted some of that hand soap onto his palm and mid squirt his Tourette’s kicked in and some of the foamy soap ended up in a nurse’s hair ala Something about Mary and we didn’t tell her. (We don’t like nurses very much.) Anyway, that’s my Tourette’s story… on to Lionel and the Minna Men.
Motherless Brooklyn wasn’t one of those books that I couldn’t put down, but it was one that will stick with me. Not just because it gave me such lines as Trend the decreased! Mend the retreats! or spread by means it finds, fed in springs by mimes, bled by mangy spies or an insight to what living with Tourette’s might be like but because it’s so human. It’s gritty and what I imagine Brooklyn to be like. I don’t picture quaint neighborhoods, I see steel and dirt and warehouses and underpasses and guys hanging out on stoops with greased back hair and… (I’m not saying this is accurate, I’m saying this is what I see and this is what Lethem gifts me with.) The Minna Men, 4 bedraggled orphans who are taken under by Frank Minna, a two bit hustlin’, Philip Marlowe wannabe. There’s Tony, the quintessential mobster in the making. Danny, the too-cool-for-school b-ball player who is more attitude than words. Gilbert, the brawny, mouthy one and then, there’s Lionel. I loved the sense of these guys. The classic Lost Boys.
Lethem does a great job of fleshing these guys out, taking emotions like guilt and concepts like conspiracies and waxing touretticly poetic (yeah, so I made that up…sue me):
Is guilt a species of Tourette’s? Maybe. It has a touchy quality, I think, a hint of sweaty fingers. Guilt wants to cover all the bases, be everywhere at once, reach into the past to tweak, neaten, and repair. Guilt like Tourettic utterance flows uselessly, inelegantly from one helpless human to another, contemptuous of perimeters, doomed to me mistaken or refused on delivery.
Guilt, like Tourette’s, tries again, learns nothing.
And the guilty soul, like the Tourettic, wears a kind of clown face---the Smokey Robinson kind, with tear tracks underneath.
Conspiracies are a version of Tourette’s syndrome, the making and tracing of unexpected connections a kind of touchiness, an expression of the yearning to touch the world, kiss it all over with theories, pull it close. Like Tourette’s, all conspiracies are ultimately solipsistic, sufferer and conspirator or theorist overrating his centrality and forever rehearsing a traumatic delight in reaction, attachment and causality, in roads out from the Rome of self.
The second gunman on the grassy knoll wasn’t part of a conspiracy—we Touretters know this to be true. He was ticking, imitating the action that had startled and allured him, the shots fired. It was just his way of saying, Me too! I’m alive! Look here! Replay the film!
I don’t want to get too into the plot; I don’t feel that that’s what makes this book so great...the writing, the wordplay, that’s where it’s at.
May 25, 2020
Golden Dagger winners seldom disappoint and Motherless Brooklyn won't break this trend. It's an unique spin on the PI genre with the detective Lionel Essrog suffering from Tourette syndrome. A gimmicky idea no doubt but one that is executed nearly flawlessly. I knew very little about Tourette and Lethem does a commendable job of putting the reader in Lionel's shoes.
Tourette comes with a manic OCD that gives Lionel more quirks and tics that an amateur actor trying their hand at method for the first time. He gets fixated on certain words - joining unrelated ones, rhyming similar ones and changing syllables till he has explored every unthinkable indignity that he can heap on the language. Example: Lionel Essrog after a couple of edits becomes Line-Only Easy-Roger. Lionel is an easy character to root for because of his self-deprecatory humor. He recognizes it as a coping mechanism but he doesn't translate it into a plea for cheap sympathy, a temptation a lesser author would have found harder to ignore. The pathos comes from the fact that Lionel is quite smart yet relegated to being a clown due to a medical condition. Lethem strikes the right balance of funny and frustrating with Tourette. When the descriptions flourish with a garish grandiosity that would have made Chandler blush or when Lionel utters 'Eat Me' (his favorite tic) for the hundredth time, it did test my patience. But I never thought Lethem is making an ill-judged decision, my take was Lethem wanted us to completely understand Lionel's perspective.
Lionel along with a couple of other orphans are taken in by a low level con man Frank Minna as his all purpose Man Fridays. They run a detective agency as a front for their extralegal undertakings. Lionel's OCD makes him better at being a detective than at being a grifter. When Minna is murdered after a deal gone wrong, Lionel takes it upon himself to solve it. Lionel's relationship with Minna is developed throughout the book. An early chapter that shows us Lionel's childhood in an orphanage till he is taken in by Minna is one of the best written parts. It is a love letter to Brooklyn in the 60s. And Lethem shows off how layered his writing is. The reader essentially gets Lionel's first person perspective on Minna. He is a surrogate father, a man Lionel hero worships yet Lethem drops enough hints to show that Lionel's views are skewed. The narrator and the narrative essentially say different things without contradicting each other. Not easy to pull off but Lethem does it.
Lethem demonstrates time and again that he is better than the average crime writer but it is obvious he doesn't have a lot of experience writing crime. While most crime writers have a reverence for the genre, Lethem probably sees it as a guilty pleasure. That's the main problem with the book. The mystery and resolution are solid but the journey often lacks any tension. The plot is good but the plotting is not. It feels like a skit of a noir. The femme fatale is nice but the token love interest and big had bruiser just sort of exist, as if the genre has burdened Lethem with those laboring artefacts when he had little use for them. It might very well be a stylistic choice but one that didn't completely work for me.
Lionel adored Minna while he probably just tolerated him as an entertaining diversion. But Lionel's motivation still works, Minna gave him a sense of purpose no one else did. Similarly Lethem promises a noir and falters. But the book still works even if the mystery is one of its relatively weaker parts. Rating - 4/5.
Movie Review: Motherless Brooklyn is probably the most underrated movie of 2019. It was the best noir I have seen in almost 20 years. I think Norton was just captivated by the concept of having someone as unique as Lionel as the protagonist. So he keeps Lionel and his scenes with Mina from the book but diverges significantly from Demme's story at 25% of the way in. This is a more serious homage to old school noirs and better for it, the book was sometimes too cute for its own good. A bit too long at 140 minutes but a must watch for crime fans. And Norton is shaping up to be as good a director and a writer as he is an actor. Rating - 9/10
Tourette comes with a manic OCD that gives Lionel more quirks and tics that an amateur actor trying their hand at method for the first time. He gets fixated on certain words - joining unrelated ones, rhyming similar ones and changing syllables till he has explored every unthinkable indignity that he can heap on the language. Example: Lionel Essrog after a couple of edits becomes Line-Only Easy-Roger. Lionel is an easy character to root for because of his self-deprecatory humor. He recognizes it as a coping mechanism but he doesn't translate it into a plea for cheap sympathy, a temptation a lesser author would have found harder to ignore. The pathos comes from the fact that Lionel is quite smart yet relegated to being a clown due to a medical condition. Lethem strikes the right balance of funny and frustrating with Tourette. When the descriptions flourish with a garish grandiosity that would have made Chandler blush or when Lionel utters 'Eat Me' (his favorite tic) for the hundredth time, it did test my patience. But I never thought Lethem is making an ill-judged decision, my take was Lethem wanted us to completely understand Lionel's perspective.
Lionel along with a couple of other orphans are taken in by a low level con man Frank Minna as his all purpose Man Fridays. They run a detective agency as a front for their extralegal undertakings. Lionel's OCD makes him better at being a detective than at being a grifter. When Minna is murdered after a deal gone wrong, Lionel takes it upon himself to solve it. Lionel's relationship with Minna is developed throughout the book. An early chapter that shows us Lionel's childhood in an orphanage till he is taken in by Minna is one of the best written parts. It is a love letter to Brooklyn in the 60s. And Lethem shows off how layered his writing is. The reader essentially gets Lionel's first person perspective on Minna. He is a surrogate father, a man Lionel hero worships yet Lethem drops enough hints to show that Lionel's views are skewed. The narrator and the narrative essentially say different things without contradicting each other. Not easy to pull off but Lethem does it.
Lethem demonstrates time and again that he is better than the average crime writer but it is obvious he doesn't have a lot of experience writing crime. While most crime writers have a reverence for the genre, Lethem probably sees it as a guilty pleasure. That's the main problem with the book. The mystery and resolution are solid but the journey often lacks any tension. The plot is good but the plotting is not. It feels like a skit of a noir. The femme fatale is nice but the token love interest and big had bruiser just sort of exist, as if the genre has burdened Lethem with those laboring artefacts when he had little use for them. It might very well be a stylistic choice but one that didn't completely work for me.
Lionel adored Minna while he probably just tolerated him as an entertaining diversion. But Lionel's motivation still works, Minna gave him a sense of purpose no one else did. Similarly Lethem promises a noir and falters. But the book still works even if the mystery is one of its relatively weaker parts. Rating - 4/5.
Movie Review: Motherless Brooklyn is probably the most underrated movie of 2019. It was the best noir I have seen in almost 20 years. I think Norton was just captivated by the concept of having someone as unique as Lionel as the protagonist. So he keeps Lionel and his scenes with Mina from the book but diverges significantly from Demme's story at 25% of the way in. This is a more serious homage to old school noirs and better for it, the book was sometimes too cute for its own good. A bit too long at 140 minutes but a must watch for crime fans. And Norton is shaping up to be as good a director and a writer as he is an actor. Rating - 9/10
Read
August 21, 2016Every few months a book gets past my quality control screening. I ought to stop beating myself up over that fact. Generally I am happy to outsource my opinions about books not yet read to smarter people; I must have lapsed this time out, tempted by the $0.3333 price tag for a recognized yet unknown author with a sexy name. I had a strong desire to drop this text at page 30, but my inexperience with positively negative reviews naively committed myself to reading the whole damn thing merely for the sake of the authority which such completionism would grant this here review.
First-person novels are difficult to write well and even more difficult for me to enjoy--the claustrophobia and extreme constriction of the novelistic world, squeezed as it is through a pair of unknowing eyes, tends toward a poverty of possibility. Contemporary novels, should they be deemed literary--and there is no clear evidence that Motherless Brooklyn be intended as a non-genre novel--cannot employ a first-person narrator without taking into account the realism brought to bear during the modernist period of literature--the consciousness-realism of Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce, et al. What Lethem fails to do, and what causes this reader to choke, is to integrate the protagonist and the first-person narrator into a coherent unity. The narrator who says "I" appears in the text as something distinct from the character whose experiences are recorded by that "I"; this "I"'s position of enunciation is never accounted for--i.e., why is he telling us this? The protagonist has Tourette's Syndrome, but apparently the narrator does not. The echolalia is always faithfully recorded within the dialogue, the narrator frequently describes physical Tourettic tics, but nothing of Tourette's appears among the words of the narrator. Being as Tourette's has a linguistic form of appearance, one might desire that the novelist make something novelistic out of this clay, that some wild dance of language might appear, that something echoing "meaningfulness" might be intimated among the meaningless barking of the Tourettic compulsion. Instead, what we get is a meaningless and relentless reminder that the protagonist has Tourette's even if the novel would suggest that he may just as well not have had Tourette's. Lethem's tic is as meaningless as Essrog's.
Perhaps this meaninglessness is intentional; that Essrog's meaningless bursts of language are a microscopic echo of the macroscopic meaninglessness of the contemporary novel. Or some similar bullshit. Such-like I've not come across since being bored silly by American Psycho in the mid-90's. Lethem provides, perhaps, a tip of the hat towards saving his primary imagery by occasionally half-heartedly suggesting similes for Tourette's--paranoia, generalizations, insomnia--but such reminders that we are reading a novelist's creation only press home the dullness with which he works his material.
In other words, if you are fascinated by the spectacle of Tourette's Syndrome and think that a novelist might have an imaginative insight into the experience--"How does it feel?"--you will want to look elsewhere. Motherless Brooklyn is an opportunity wasted.
__________
An excellent response to my review and comments below, can be found in Friend Drew's review.
First-person novels are difficult to write well and even more difficult for me to enjoy--the claustrophobia and extreme constriction of the novelistic world, squeezed as it is through a pair of unknowing eyes, tends toward a poverty of possibility. Contemporary novels, should they be deemed literary--and there is no clear evidence that Motherless Brooklyn be intended as a non-genre novel--cannot employ a first-person narrator without taking into account the realism brought to bear during the modernist period of literature--the consciousness-realism of Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce, et al. What Lethem fails to do, and what causes this reader to choke, is to integrate the protagonist and the first-person narrator into a coherent unity. The narrator who says "I" appears in the text as something distinct from the character whose experiences are recorded by that "I"; this "I"'s position of enunciation is never accounted for--i.e., why is he telling us this? The protagonist has Tourette's Syndrome, but apparently the narrator does not. The echolalia is always faithfully recorded within the dialogue, the narrator frequently describes physical Tourettic tics, but nothing of Tourette's appears among the words of the narrator. Being as Tourette's has a linguistic form of appearance, one might desire that the novelist make something novelistic out of this clay, that some wild dance of language might appear, that something echoing "meaningfulness" might be intimated among the meaningless barking of the Tourettic compulsion. Instead, what we get is a meaningless and relentless reminder that the protagonist has Tourette's even if the novel would suggest that he may just as well not have had Tourette's. Lethem's tic is as meaningless as Essrog's.
Perhaps this meaninglessness is intentional; that Essrog's meaningless bursts of language are a microscopic echo of the macroscopic meaninglessness of the contemporary novel. Or some similar bullshit. Such-like I've not come across since being bored silly by American Psycho in the mid-90's. Lethem provides, perhaps, a tip of the hat towards saving his primary imagery by occasionally half-heartedly suggesting similes for Tourette's--paranoia, generalizations, insomnia--but such reminders that we are reading a novelist's creation only press home the dullness with which he works his material.
In other words, if you are fascinated by the spectacle of Tourette's Syndrome and think that a novelist might have an imaginative insight into the experience--"How does it feel?"--you will want to look elsewhere. Motherless Brooklyn is an opportunity wasted.
__________
An excellent response to my review and comments below, can be found in Friend Drew's review.
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