Motherless Brooklyn

A mobster with tourettes searches for the man who killed his boss.

A good story, but Brooklyn is the real star here, and this is a great (and accurate) depiction of it.

Albert Mobilio's review in the New York Times online (October 17, 1999) is too generous. Mobilio notes that the book, like Lethem's earlier novels, was a mash-up of genres, in this case mixing hard-boiled detective fiction with a narrator with Tourette's, so produce an effect Mobilio thinks of as Keatonesque. Mobilio concludes:"In 'Motherless Brooklyn,' solving the crime is beside the point. If you're a mystery maven, this might bother you. 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 . . . and you go with them, astonished to leave yourself behind.' Under the guise of a detective novel, Lethem has written a more piercing tale of investigation, one revealing how the mind drives on its own ''wheels within wheels.'' The book would be good if this had been true, but it isn't: like so many writers and visual artists, Lethem was combining genres because he liked each of them, and the play of cognition and language that results provides only brief surprises and jokes, and not a fundamental rethinking of one genre by another, or an undermining of one discourse's reality by the other. The same happens in music, with Alfred Schnittke or George Rochberg. These are incomplete works, dissonant with themselves but without a sense that the author, or composer, has imagined that the interaction might produce a deeper unity, or might itself be the result of a distracted consciousness. It is a common artistic strategy that comes from not realizing it might be possible to think through genre interactions, not to produce neo-conservative harmonies or imaginary syntheses, but to show that the elements of a mash-up should have the power to entirely undermine and disperse one another, and not just produce an ephemeral effect of surprise. A good example of a more profound rethinking of the meeting of genres -- in fact, it is perhaps the only necessary example -- is Alain Robbe-Grillet's "Jealousy."

Javaczuk found a copy of this at a LFL in Fairmount, that was a bit stained and rough around the edges edges. We got this copy a little later at Philly AIDs Thrift had a cleaner copy, which we got. First copy was wild released.
This was an interesting book, set in one of my favorite city places. It's a nod to noir, detective stories, mysteries, and quirky heroes (main character is a "detective" who has Tourettes syndrome. The author does a great job of demonstrating and explaining the condition.) It's another slice of life, but one that is easily pictured thanks to the writing of Jonathan Lethem.

Great read, with language that went spinning through my head for days. Jonathan Lethem has a gift for patterning and phrase. I found some parts of the plot less than convincing, but I was happy to be along for the ride.

A very inventive and touching story with unforgettable characters. I really enjoyed reading it, although I wished I'd had a little more experience with traditional hard boiled detective stories, as I could pick up hints that there were interesting plays on the genre going on that probably work even better if you've read a bit more Raymond Chandler. Still, a great read all the way through.

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem was first published in 1999. The story is told by Lionel Essrog who considers himself a private investigator. Lionel has Tourette’s Syndrome, a disorder marked by tics, both physical and vocal. He is one of a group of young men who grew up in a local orphanage and as boys, the four of them were taken under the wing of Frank Minna, a small time hood who sometimes calls his business a detective agency and sometimes a transportation company. Lionel and the other boys call themselves the Minna Men, and look up to Frank as a strong father figure. Lionel is devastated when Frank is murdered and vows to hunt down the killer.

While this is not a classic detective story, it is still a story about crime, pursuit and retribution told by a unique voice. Lionel’s Tourette’s shapes the story with his compulsive behavior and strange wording that he cannot control. He taps, grabs, and pats people and things, he needs to ensure that life revolves around certain numbers and his brain seizes on words and spits out vulgar variations.

I found this to be a fantastic yet bittersweet story. Although compulsive and twitchy, Lionel is a both a likeable and sympathetic character. The author has created a darkly poetic, well crafted yet absurd story whose word play enhances the lonely life the book is illuminating.

I was writing a review of this, and a glitch effed it up and lost it. It's not worth it to me to write this whole review again.
What I'll say is that this book was worth to me was that it brought awareness to Tourette's Syndrome. The protagonist had Tourette's Syndrome and as the reader can imagine it controls his whole life.
I expected the author to say something in the afterword about how he knew what it was like to have Tourette's, but he didn't. He just wrote a list of names. So I don't know if the author had Tourette's Syndrome, or if someone in his family had it, or a friend of his, or he researched it, etc.

Loved it. The voice is unique, funny and tragic, and now I'm hoping the author's other books are as enjoyable.

Noir with a twist. The book worked for me until it didn't. After awhile the tic-ing and the Tourette's interfered with my ability to maintain interest in the story.

Really clever writing, no idea how accurate a depiction of tourettes sufferer this is but the protagonist is instantly sympathetic and intriguing which keeps you reading. That and the terrible jokes.

Hello, done. Curious noir novel, full of familiar landscapes, cheap gangsters, intrigue with murders, few, New York neighborhood, etc. The novelty lies in the protagonist, an orphan with Tourette syndrome who is the star of the show, perhaps the best and worst of the narrative. Let me explain, the protagonist Lionel investigates the murder of his boss and mentor, and throughout the plot his continuous compulsive outbursts, which are very well explained, distract from the main plot that isn’t exactly groundbreaking, making the progression of the story feel eternal. In short, a passable and totally forgettable story. (Translated from Spanish)

I really loved this book. The narrator has Tourette's Syndrome, and a lot of the tale-telling involves how he over-processes every moment of his life, launching small but socially off-putting verbal and physical tics in every interaction he undertakes. I don't know enough about Tourette's to know just how accurate this depiction is, so I won't dive deeply there, but the writing is great, and this character is so well-developed it was easy to get into his head and view the world from his warped perspective. The other characters are not as well-developed or as interesting- they mostly serve to create the setting for this fascinating narrator, which is sometimes charming but mostly depressing. The mystery of the plot doesn't totally add up or make complete sense, but I thought it was only a vehicle for giving us a ride with this intriguing character. Okay, my review doesn't sound very convincing that this is a great book- just give it a try and you'll appreciate the writing and the character.

Amazing book. Frankly, there is nothing special about the plot. Its the main character and how the author puts you inside his head that makes this special.

The reader does a terrific job with the character of the narrator, a Brooklyn detective who has Tourette's syndrome. The plot dragged a bit in its boilerplate noir and backstory - it's not my favorite genre, but it was definitely a worthwhile listen.

The sort of book that leaves your eyes sore and red from exhaustion and makes you resent all those inconsequential activities of life which interrupt you from reading it.

Some books are more about voice than plot. That is the case with Motherless Brooklyn. And for that reason, I feel fortunate to have listened to the audiobook version, which was phenomenally narrated by Geoffrey Cantor with an amazing variety of voices that made each character distinct--but most of all made the Tourette's Syndrome-inflicted narrator a unique, believable voice at the center of a complex web of loyalties and betrayals involving a small time Brooklyn hood, his brother, his wife, some doormen, an all-night Korean convenience store, a Zendo, a huge assassin, Japanese businessmen/monks--well, you get the idea. As in the other book I read by Lethem, he is never short of ideas or imagination. The noir-ish aspects are a bit too self-conscious, as if he doesn't want them to escape the notice of a reader not familiar with the genre. And the story goes on a bit too long, but thanks to the superb narration, it was a rewarding listen.

> Have you noticed yet that I relate everything to my Tourette's? Yup, you guessed it, it's a tic. Counting is a symptom, but counting symptoms is also a symptom, a tic plus ultra. I've got meta-Tourette's.

> I might have stopped then. I believed the giant was unconscious under the air bag. He was at least silent and still, not firing his gun, not struggling to free himself. But I felt the wild call of symmetry: His car ought to be crumpled on both sides. I needed to maul both of the Contour's shoulders. I rolled forward and into position, then backed and crashed against his car once more, wrecking it on the passenger side as I had on the driver's. It’s a Tourette's thing—you wouldn't understand.

I think Lethem did it again. Great book. It has a pretty good mystery and I think there are enough clues for you to solve it on your own before the protagonist does. I'm not sure...

Writing is good and the pacing is great. Some action, heartache, romance and comedy.

Lionel Essrog, the orphan car boy and amateur detective of Motherless Brooklyn, has a unique narrative voice. Afflicted by severe (and un-medicated) Tourette's syndrome, he has uncontrollable urges to vocalize meaningless phrases, touch people without permission, and to make objects symmetrical. Nonetheless, he spins an intriguing murder mystery tale, centered around the death of Frank Minna, the small-time operator who rescued him and his friends from a Brooklyn orphanage and gave them jobs as his posse--the Minna Men. I don't typically read whodunits, so it is difficult for me to evaluate this one according to the standards of the genre, but it definitely kept me reading.

According to an old book list, I read this in 2003. This would have been shortly after I first joined Readerville, my first (and always most beloved) foray into online book discussions—or really any kind of book discussion with a wider group of people than my own circle of friends. This was a much-loved book there, and I distinctly remember finding it on the table at Housing Works for $3 during a restless book-browsing lunch hour and being so happy to snap it up. The thrill of the hunt! Which has, in fact, never diminished no matter how many books and galleys I have piling up. Anyway, I remember liking the book but not much more than that, and am thinking that this is one I'll probably reread at some point.

I really enjoyed this novel. This book would have received five stars from me, yet it dragged in the middle and I feel lost some of the energy that comes across so wonderfully in the beginning of the novel. I very much enjoyed experiencing the protagonist's inner experience of living with Tourette Syndrome. The mystery of what happened to Frank Minna moves the plot along well, but I feel the real value in this book is listening to how Leroy's experience of growing up as an orphan and how the development and progression of his Tourette's Syndrome informed who he was as an adult. Letham uses quite a bit of levity depicting Leroy's Tourettic responses and inner thoughts in such a way, I felt, that does not demean the experience of someone with this condition but shows how one can use humor to cope with what we cannot control.

Although the actual mystery is perfectly fine, it is the character of Lionel Essrog that makes this book really shine. Lionel suffers from Tourette's syndrome, which causes him to shout out odd and often vulgar phrases. Lionel was rescued along with several other misfit orphans by smalltime hood Frank Minna. When Frank is murdered, Lionel determines that he will find the culprit. This is arguably Lethem’s finest book, both an intriguing mystery and a character study. Lionel’s verbal outbursts can be alternately heartbreaking, cringe inducing, and hilarious.

I haven't enjoyed a book this much since Junat Diaz' great novel, The Immortal Life of Oscar Wao. Jonathan Lethem's main character has a voice that is unlike any other any completely authentic, and like Diaz he writes in the first person. The aspect of the book that begs for attention is that the protaganist has Tourette's Syndrome. What may be overlooked in the reviews is how smart and funny he is. I laughed out loud quite often. The plot revolves around a murder which the main character is trying to solve and I frequently went back to re-read sections as the story unfolded. I enjoyed going back almost more than going into the new territory. This is definitely a book that I will keep so I can re-read it one day.

Lionel Essrog has not been able to catch a break his entire life. Orphaned at an early age. Lionel suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, which causes him to tic and bark out nonsensical obscenities at the most inopportune times. As the narrator of Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem’s engaging take on the hard-boiled detective genre, Lionel is part of a small band of orphans taken under the wing of Frank Minna, a two-bit hoodlum who runs a decidedly downscale car service/detective agency in downtown Brooklyn. When Frank is murdered, Essrog (aka The Human Freakshow) has to step up his game, from a hapless flunky to a full-fledged investigator, in order to unravel the mystery surrounding Minna’s death. The only thing is that no one has actually asked him to get involved in the case—nobody really takes him that seriously—and the pressure from the self-imposed assignment causes his ticcing tendencies to spin out of control.

This was a highly satisfying novel to read. The basic plot, which involves a complex set of deceptions, double-crossings, and intrigues set in and around a Manhattan-based Zen Buddhist temple, is interesting enough, if somewhat convoluted. Where Motherless Brooklyn really shines, though, is as a character study of someone afflicted with an illness that most of us know very little about. In Lionel, the Tourettic anti-hero, the author has created one of the most compelling protagonists that I have come across in recent fiction. Lethem does a marvelous job of getting the reader inside Essrog’s head to understand the thought processes behind the behaviors. The clipped, playful dialogue throughout the book is spot on and a very effective way to tell the story. Much of the book is also simply hilarious, with a number of laugh-out-loud scenes scattered amongst some otherwise grim events. This was my first exposure to the author’s work, but it definitely will not be my last.

A Private Detective with Tourette's, what could possibly go wrong?

When Lionel is a young orphan he is rescued from his hiding place in the library of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys in Brooklyn by Frank Minna. Frank takes Lionel and three other boys and through employing them on a variety of 'very odd' jobs he turns them into Minna's men; private detectives working out of a limo business.

Minna accepts Lionel's outbursts and tics as just Lionel being Lionel. Despite referring to him a 'Freakshow' Frank does try to help Lionel.
"With the help of Minna’s book I contextualized my symptoms as Tourette’s, then discovered how little context that was. My constellation of behaviors was “unique as a snowflake,” oh, joy, and evolving, like some micro-scoped crystal in slow motion, to reveal new facets, and to spread from its place at my private core to cover my surface, my public front. The freak show was now the whole show, and my earlier, ticless self impossible anymore to recall clearly"

When Frank is murdered after a stake out goes wrong, Lionel sets out to find the killer. Lionel now has to be a real detective as he tries to avoid the unknown killer, Minna's questionable 'Clients' and the homicide detective in charge of the case.

"'She’s going to a precipice, pleasurepolice, philanthropriest
'Shut up, Lionel.'

The detective looked at me like I was crazy.

My life story to this point:
The teacher looked at me like I was crazy.
The social-services worker looked at me like I was crazy.
The boy looked at me like I was crazy and then hit me.
The girl looked at me like I was crazy.
The woman looked at me like I was crazy.
The black homicide detective looked at me like I was crazy. "

Letham manages to create in Lionel a believable character who coping strategies and issues with his Tourette's constantly threaten to derail his investigation and indeed his life. The dialogue is shorty and snappy, much like the 50's pulp fiction crime genre. However it is his clever bouts of introspection that make this much more than a simple who done-it detective story.

" 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 toothbrush in the mirror. I mean, the object looks strange, oddly particular in its design, strange tapered handle and slotted, miter-cut bristles, and I wonder if I’ve ever looked at it closely before or whether someone snuck in overnight and substituted this new toothbrush for my old one. I have this relationship to objects in general—they will sometimes become uncontrollably new and vivid to me, and I don’t know whether this is a symptom of Tourette’s or not. I’ve never seen it described in the literature. Here’s the strangeness of having a Tourette’s brain, then: no control in my personal experiment of self. What might be only strangeness must always be auditioned for relegation to the domain of symptom, just as symptoms always push into other domains, demanding the chance to audition for their moment of acuity or relevance, their brief shot—coulda been a contender!—at centrality. Personalityness. There’s a lot of traffic in my head, and it’s two-way."

This is a brilliant author. The main character has Tourette's syndrome, the story told from his point of view. The writing reflects this in more than meets the eye at first. Four orphans from a local home work for Frank Minna, a small-time gangster, and they mature under his influence. Readers with no experience with the condition will learn quite a bit about Tourette's. The story is realistic with wonderful details. It's about city kids learning more than they already know about the streets, learning to be something more than they thought they could be, becoming adults and trusting in things unseen, trusting in each other, and what happens to them along the way. It's about how other people affect our lives.

I'd suggest reading anything by this author, which I will now do myself.

This book is a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

I was pretty entertained when I read this - it had some of the humor that Absurdistan tried to have and, well, failed. The descriptions of the orphanage in NY were insightful. The boys didn't live like Dickens but their circumstances were not necessarily much better. Tony's adoption by the Quaker family was poignant, and it, too, made me think: do these young people and others like them want a family, or after a certain age, do they only think they want a family? And growing up in an orphanage - what chance to these young boys have to have a decent life when they grow up? They don't have much of a basis for becoming doctors and lawyers and professionals. But they are entrepreneurs!

Lionel, the central character around whom most of the action happens, has Tourette's syndrome. His syndrome is a part of him: it defines his actions (obsessively hitting the dashboard 6 times because there are 6 Krystal burgers in the bag) and it never lets him forget it exists. I think that's an insight I gained from this book - when you have a disability of whatever genre, you can't think it away. Your friends and family will have their own lives in their own skin and they will be able to see and adapt to your disability when you are there, but you cannot escape it.

Several humorous parts come to mind - young Lionel finding that he must kiss the boys in the orphanage (part of his Tourette's), the absurdity of moving pieces of furniture and band equipment out of trucks and moving vans and into warehouses and apartments (reminds me of Existentialist plays and their brand of L'Absurde), and the six doormen who realize that they are not thugs. (They're students in a Zen studio, but that's a whole different story!)

Definitely recommend it as a fun, quick, quirky read.

A really well-done mystery, featuring a protagonist with Tourette's Syndrome. Lionel is an orphan, but when he and 3 other boys are picked at an orphanage to help out a man named Frank Minna, doing odd jobs, his life is changed... Minna's a small-time mobster, but he becomes a father figure to the naive Lionel. And when, years later, Minna is murdered, it's Lionel's unexpected persistence that will lead him to solve the crime - but also lead him into danger from more sides that he even knows of...
The book is really believable - surprisingly so, for one featuring the Mob, a shady Japanese corporation, and a mysterious Zen school... all ties in with violent crime... and it really gives one insight into the inner life of someone suffering from this ailment.

Motherless Brooklyn is the first of Lethem’s more well-known novels, and so I was expecting to really like it, particularly after Girl in Landscape left me cold. It follows native Brooklynite Lionel Essrog, who is recruited in childhood along with a few friends from an orphanage (hence the title) by local small-time crook Frank Minna, to be groomed as what Minna styles “private detectives,” but who are actually just goons, thugs, or whatever you’d like to call them. In the novel’s opening scene, Frank is killed, and Motherless Brooklyn revolves around Lionel’s quest to solve the mystery of his father-figure’s murder.

Lionel also has Tourette’s syndrome (much less well-known when the novel was written), and his investigative interviews are hampered by his constant outbursts of verbal nonsense. There’s probably a postmodern reason for this, something to do with investigations, truth, the way our minds tick, etc. But I was never engaged with the novel enough to care. The plot itself is stock-standard crime novel stuff, complete with Japanese mobsters, Brooklyn thugs and an antagonistic homicide detective – although I did like the idea of telling a story from the point of view of one of a mobster’s anonymous thugs, the guys who always lurk menacingly in the background, whom we never think of having their own lives or stories.

Overall I didn’t particularly enjoy Motherless Brooklyn, and if I had to pick one I’d still say Lethem’s best book is As She Climbed Across The Table, although that wasn’t what I’d describe as a great novel. I’ve read Lethem’s first five novels now, and find him to be a frustrating writer – always on the verge of writing something really great, but never quite getting there. Hopefully his next book, Fortress of Solitude, will finally do it.