Motherless Brooklyn [Paperback]

Jonathan Lethem (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 24, 2000 | Series: Vintage Contemporaries

From America's most inventive novelist, Jonathan Lethem, comes this compelling and compulsive riff on the classic detective novel.

Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, 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 homage to the classic detective novel by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Pop quiz. Please complete the following sentence: "There are days when I get up in the morning and stagger into the bathroom and begin running water and then I look up and I don't even recognize my own _." If you answered face, then your name is obviously not Jonathan Lethem. Instead of taking the easy out, the genre-busting novelist concludes this by-the-numbers string of words with toothbrush in the mirror.

This brilliant sentence and a lot of other really excellent ones compose Lethem's engaging fifth novel, Motherless Brooklyn. Lionel Essrog, a detective suffering from Tourette's syndrome, spins the narrative as he tracks down the killer of his boss, Frank Minna. Minna enlisted Lionel and his friends when they were teenagers living at Saint Vincent's Home for Boys, ostensibly to perform odd jobs (we're talking very odd) and over the years trained them to become a team of investigators. The Minna men face their most daunting case when they find their mentor in a Dumpster bleeding from stab wounds delivered by an assailant whose identity he refuses to reveal--even while he's dying on the way to the hospital.

Detectives? Brooklyn? Is this the same Lethem who danced the postapocalypso in Amnesia Moon? Incredibly, yes, and rarely has such a departure been pulled off with this much aplomb. As in the "toothbrush" passage above, Lethem sets himself up with the imposing task of making tired conventions new. Brooklyn accents? Fuggetaboutit. Lethem's dialogue is as light on its feet as a prize fighter. Lionel's Tourette's could have been an easy joke, but Lethem probes so convincingly into the disorder that you feel simultaneously rattled, sympathetic, and irritated by the guy. Sure, the story is a mystery, but Motherless Brooklyn could be about flower arranging, for all we care. What counts is Lionel's tic-ridden take on a world full of surprises, propelling this fiction forward at edgy, breakneck speed. --Ryan Boudinot --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Hard-boiled crime fiction has never seen the likes of Lionel Essrog, the barking, grunting, spasmodically twitching hero of Lethem's gonzo detective novel that unfolds amidst the detritus of contemporary Brooklyn. As he did in his convention-smashing last novel, Girl in Landscape, Lethem uses a blueprint from genre fiction as a springboard for something entirely different, a story of betrayal and lost innocence that in both novels centers on an orphan struggling to make sense of an alien world. Raised in a boys home that straddles an off-ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge, Lionel is a misfit among misfits: an intellectually sensitive loner with a bad case of Tourette's syndrome, bristling with odd habits and compulsions, his mind continuously revolting against him in lurid outbursts of strange verbiage. When the novel opens, Lionel has long since been rescued from the orphanage by a small-time wiseguy, Frank Minna, who hired Lionel and three other maladjusted boys to do odd jobs and to staff a dubious limo service/detective agency on a Brooklyn main drag, creating a ragtag surrogate family for the four outcasts, each fiercely loyal to Minna. When Minna is abducted during a stakeout in uptown Manhattan and turns up stabbed to death in a dumpster, Lionel resolves to find his killer. It's a quest that leads him from a meditation center in Manhattan to a dusty Brooklyn townhouse owned by a couple of aging mobsters who just might be gay, to a zen retreat and sea urchin harvesting operation in Maine run by a nefarious Japanese corporation, and into the clutches of a Polish giant with a fondness for kumquats. In the process, Lionel finds that his compulsions actually make him a better detective, as he obsessively teases out plots within plots and clues within clues. Lethem's title suggests a dense urban panorama, but this novel is more cartoonish and less startlingly original than his last. Lethem's sixth sense for the secret enchantments of language and the psyche nevertheless make this heady adventure well worth the ride. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 311 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October 24, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375724834
• ISBN-13: 978-0375724831
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (252 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #29,587 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jonathan Lethem was born in New York and attended Bennington College.

He is the author of seven novels including Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which was named Novel of the Year by Esquire and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Salon Book Award, as well as the Macallan Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger.

He has also written two short story collections, a novella and a collection of essays, edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, guest-edited The Year's Best Music Writing 2002, and was the founding fiction editor of Fence magazine.

His writings have appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, McSweeney's and many other periodicals.

He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 50 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Authentically bizarre March 14, 2000

By Bill Loehfelm

Format:Hardcover

Pleased to see Lethem's novel won the critic's circle award. Lethem's masterstroke is his narrator; Essrog is utterly believable. Often I wished hard he would just shut up and get on with solving the case, but there was no way I was going to stop reading. A very human reaction to a fictional character. Once you accept the Tourette's as part of the rhythm of the book it becomes a fascinating element of the character. As a former Brooklynite, I found Lethem's depiction of that area dead-on accurate (down to Rusty Staub and "half a fag") and beautifully realized without going over the top. Wonderful choice of words without overdoing it. Brooklyn becomes a main character with as valuable and intimate role in the story as any of the people. By the end I had a hard time believing Lethem was not a Brooklyn raised orphan with Tourette's. An entertaining, compelling and intelligent work. The defintion of excellent fiction.

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A darkly comic tale, with a detective with a difference. November 29, 1999

By Margaret Fiore

Format:Hardcover

Lionel is one of four orphans from St. Vincent's who are recruited by a small-time New York hood for grunt work. Afflicted by Tourette's, Lionel drives most people crazy, but he tickles his mentor's sense of humor. All four orphans (the "motherless Brooklyn" of the title) look up to their leader, but Lionel's admiration includes a large component of unstated love.

When his father figure is murdered in the street, Lionel is the only one of the four no-longer-boys with the intellect, loyalty, and determination to find out what really happened.

Previously a science fiction author, in this book, Lethem takes off into reality like a rocket. The only alien landscape we view here is the inside of the Tourette-inflicted mind, and Lionel is as alien as it gets. But his tics and hollers are the fuller realizations of our own small compulsions and fascinations. They bring the reader right into his mind and body. Despite the pace of the action, and constant plot twists and developments (he tells this story walking, alright) his is an internal journey, and very human.

This is an absolutely riveting good book.

42 of 50 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful but flawed February 20, 2000

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

There I was, reading happily along, totally enthralled by the history of the Minna Men, Lionel's fantastic verbal riffs, the mystery and sadness of Frank's death, Lionel's reaction to it, thinking: man, this book is an instant classic, when BAM! Enter Julia on page 99, and ppppfffft, the air went out of the story for me. She answers the door in a slip and stockings like a Chandler dame, complete with cigarette, gun and "dusty suitcase" full of lingerie. She's a stock character from Central Casting, an anachronistic cliche not worthy of the expectations Lethem has set up, the wonderful idiosyncrasies of Essrog, the individual, distinctive personalities of the male characters. We also leave behind the fantastic descriptions of Brooklyn, the strong sense of place that's part of the magic of the earlier part of the book -- it turns into a straight detective story and plays with genre conventions without adding much in the way of new archetypes or ideas -- the wildly original language continues, but that isn't enough, at least, not for me. Damn. The first 98 pages are BRILLIANT. Next time out, I hope Lethem sustains that level of inventive originality for an entire book.