Motherless Brooklyn (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Context is everything..." (more)
Key Phrases: garbage cop, ambulance ramp, phone downstairs, Frank Minna, Minna Men, Court Street (more...)

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; Later Printing edition (October 24, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375724834
• ISBN-13: 978-0375724831
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (216 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,121 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wheels Within Wheels..., August 31, 2004

By	B. Trainor (summerville, sc United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There are many negative reviews focused on Motherless Brooklyn's weak plot. I can see how the murder-mystery of the novel may pale in comparison to a Hammett or Chandler design, but come on...??? Would it have been realistic to have a bunch of high school drop-out, low-level thugs who have never fired a gun or solved a previous case, effectively traverse their way through a complex, multi-faceted whodunit and come out on top? These are regular guys, maybe even less than regular. They are definitely not comic book or legendary sleuths; they are no Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe...they're not even an Inspector Clouseau.

Besides, the plot is merely a vehicle for a strangely compelling and brutally honest character study of Lionel Essrog, a 33 year old man who's never had a family, never been out of Brooklyn, but does have Tourette's syndrome. This could have been simply a gimmick, a device for fresh detective novel, but Lionel is self-effacing without becoming pitiable, awkward without becoming pathetic and brave without becoming heroic; he is truly original.

Also fascinating is Lethem's ability to take a walking cliché like Frank Minna and make him an interesting and unusually memorable character. He's a nobody...a hood, a prankster; there are millions of him out there, telling the same jokes, but he meant something to someone, to Lionel, and we see that sometimes that's all it takes.

Compared to other "private-dick" crime novels, I can see the enthusiasts not being completely sated, but for the rest of us...the story transcends the genre. It is a sincere, convincing slice-of-life. I enjoyed it and am eager to read more from Lethem.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Authentically bizarre, March 14, 2000

By	Bill Loehfelm (New Orleans, Louisiana USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Motherless Brooklyn (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 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Edward Norton Making a Movie of This?, March 31, 2000

By	Justin Gardner (Kansas City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Motherless Brooklyn (Hardcover)

I admit it. The only reason I picked up this book in the first place was because Edward Norton optioned it as a possible movie. But then something funny happened: I couldn't put it down.

I completely see why Norton likes this book. The main character, Lionel Essrog is the ultimate anti-hero: a man afflicted with Tourette's Sydrome who tries to solve a murder with no leads, and nobody to listen to him.

Sure, the detective story subplot isn't always edge-of-your-seat, but it's not boring either. Much of this is due to the charm that Lethem brings to his endearing, fractured protagonist, a loner who can't connect with anybody on a physical or emotional level.

I'm going to tell you all a secret now. Motherless Brooklyn isn't really a detective story about crimes and murders and what not. Sure, those elements are in there, but in actuality it's a meditation on a man seemingly too smart for his life, but too afflicted with Tourette's to change it.

I highly recommend this book. Although I didn't give it five stars, I still think it's memorable and charming enough to curl up with whenever you feel like getting lost in somebody else's world.

Cheers...