Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Motherless Brooklyn
Book Review: Brilliant Reinvention of Hard-Boiled Genre
Summary: 5 Stars
From the prose, you know right away Lethem is no mere genre writer. In this book, he subverts the hard-boiled genre while tipping his hat to it - what results is a delightful modern book that is as intensely gripping as it is witty. In taking on the hard-boiled genre, Lethem takes on the burden of (*gasp*) actually working out a plot. It's refreshing to see a literary writer who is unscrupulous about shaping a plot.And the story is a good one. Lionel Essrog, a 'disciple' of Frank Minna who leads him and three others in a hapless detective agency, has to solve the murder of his mentor which he only witnessed through a wire tap. The story structure follows the hard-boiled structure of Chandler. But the characters and situations themselves are ingenious and hilariously modern.
Lionel Essrog, in my mind, is one of the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction. The Tourette's Syndrome he has is not just a gimmick, but a vent for Lethem to deploy narrative pyrotechnics. The subconscious rants and tangents of thought are made transparent in this book. It's a brilliant move on the part of Lethem.
One of the more lasting strengths of "Motherless Brooklyn" is its sweetness and earnestness. Lionel is as honest and emotional character as any we have had in recent fiction. As he remembers and yearns for (and to be like) his mentor Frank Minna, his release of emotion is straightforward and even, sentimental. It parallels Lethem's nostalgia for the old hard-boiled characters in Chandler's books and the style of writing itself (he directly quotes him a couple of times.) It's a beautiful tribute to a bygone era, a different time.
Book Review: Brilliant-but flawed. Nevertheless, I loved it.
Summary: 5 Stars
Jonathan Lethem has to be the most frustrating writer around. His novels seem to be either brilliant (Motherless Brooklyn, Gun with Occasional Music) or truly awful (Girl in Landscape, Amnesia Moon). Blessed with any extraordinary imagination and a deft and persuasive writing voice, his better novels have the potential to be true iconoclastic masterpieces. All have fallen frustratingly short of that mark however, though Motherless Brooklyn comes close to that status.
The flaws are generally the same-too many major story elements that don't always mesh well, secondary characters that are a bit too much off the wall, too much dedication to the concept of the story as opposed to dedication to the story itself.
Nevertheless, when he's close to on his mark-as he is here-it can be compelling reading.
Motherless Brooklyn takes the concept of the "misfit" detective to an extreme.
Lionel Essrog is a detective in name only. The "agency" he works for is in actuality a "gofer" shop owned by a man with loose mob connections that essentially runs errands for mobsters who want to keep things at arms length. And Lionel's status within the shop is marginal indeed-he's the gofer for the gofers, largely because his Tourette's syndrome undermines his "usefulness" as others see it. However, when his boss is killed Lionel becomes a detective in fact and seeks to track down the killer.
The story revolves around the workings on the fringe of the mob, religious cults and internecine family warfare, major story elements that at times are a bit out of joint with one another. However, the characters are well developed, and while this is not a true "detective" or "suspense" novel in the traditional sense, the thread of the story is compelling and the suspense sufficient to the task, for the true object here is to see how a man with Tourette's syndrome, congenitally conditioned by both his disease and those around him to see himself as marginalized, overcomes all that to blossom into true, mature, fully engaged adulthood. It is a fascinating and well-crafted exposition.
I can only hope that one day Lethem can put it all together and reach his ultimate potential-I have no doubt such an effort could only be described as a masterpiece. I hope I get to read it.
Book Review: Brilliant.
Summary: 5 Stars
Lethem's writing seems to be totally hit or miss for me: I loved "Gun, With Occasional Music," I hated "Amnesia Moon" and had similar reactions to stories in his collection "Wall of the Sky, Wall of the Eye." Fortunately, this falls on the love side of my Lethem fence. Lethem's protagonist, Lionel Essrog, was raised in an orphanage in Brooklyn and suffers from Tourette's syndrome. Since becoming a teenager he has been a "Minna Man," part of a group of orphans turned into wanna-be wiseguys operated by a low-level hood. Things get going with a bang as Minna is murdered right off the bat, leaving the four Minna Men to try and figure out what happened and if they can trust each other. The mystery isn't all that special in it's own right and the climax spins a little out of control-but Lethem's deft humanization of a Tourette's sufferer is brilliant and affecting, more than making up for any plot deficiencies. Lethem is a writer who fires off literary pyrotechnics which sometimes blow up in his face, fortunately here they light up the page in a most delightfully unexpected way.Book Review: Brilliant. Edgy.
Summary: 5 Stars
I came to this a bit late I must admit, the only one to suffer was myself. Oh how I wish I'd read this sooner. It's brilliant. It's Lethem's fifth novel and for me it shows him at the top of his game. He's exploring what seems like new territory for him, a brave move and a challenge he's risen to like no other. I honestly don't think that's an exaggeration. He's found his feet with the sentence, and moves you through this story with master strokes, with humour, and uncanny insight. Working with a detective has suited him well, working through the clues, at times uncovering, at others teasing out - and handling Tourette's inside a novel in such depth - a highly skilled author. Edgy.
I also recommend this one by Jayne Joso: Soothing Music for Stray Cats
Book Review: Brilliantly Defying All Convention
Summary: 5 Stars
In his treatise On Writing, Stephen King says the spark for many of the best novels is when a writer combines two or more disparate ideas/topics/themes and then figures out how they can complement each other in interesting or unexpected ways. Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn is one of the best examples you'll ever find of this theory in action.
To explain why, let's try to follow (an absurdly abbreviated version of) what must've been Lethem's thought process before actually sitting down to write: "What I want to write is a literary detective novel that pays tribute to the masters like Raymond Chandler. I like that. But I need something more. What if one of the characters has Tourette's Syndrome? Yeah, that'll add intrigue. But he can't be a punchline, he has to be sympathetic. And his relationship with language is how I'll make him sympathetic. Boom, novel."
Then, he sat down to write, and the book he produced (in 1999) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, turned out to be one of the most-read novels of the aughts, and is often cited as a favorite novel of all time.
The plot is pretty simple: Gangster Frank Minna is murdered, and the four wise guys he's nurtured since orphan-hood (Tourrette's-afflicted Lionel Essrog being one of them) try to find out who killed him and why. Lionel tells us the the story in first person, as he wanders around New York City and then coastal Maine looking for clues and doing his best to manage his disease.
In my mind, Motherless Brooklyn succeeds spectacularly for two reasons: 1) The novel is incredibly inventive, and avoids cliche, when cliche would've been easy, and 2) It's very clear how much fun Lethem must've had writing this novel, which makes it fun to read.
First, how easy would it have been to make Lionel and his Tourette's a silly source of comic relief? Instead, Lethem uses Lionel's Tourette's in an unexpected way: He uses the disease to show us how intricate and clever language can be. Lionel must use the "wall of langauge" as a way to protect himself from his disease-addled brain's attempts to destroy him. For Lionel, language isn't what sets him apart from what's normal, it's what helps him be normal himself. If he didn't have language, even nonsensical strings of language, as an outlet to oppose his other physical tics, his disease would get the better of him, rendering him useless. This is part of Lethem's trick to make Lionel a sympathetic and incredibly self-aware character, as opposed to a source of cheap laughs. He also has Lionel continuously explain Tourette's to us so that we not only understand it (see below for an amazingly written passage explaining Tourette's), but we also understand how his unconventional thinking is actually helping him solve the mystery.
Secondly, if we understand #1, then we can also understand that when Lethem has Lionel let loose with a string of language (Franksbook! forkspook! finksblood, i.e.), the effect is not meant to be comic relief. It's just Lionel being Lionel. But, those Tourette's word explosions (ghostradish! pepperpony! kaiserphone!), which appear frequently, sure had to be helluva lot of fun to write! If Lethem wants to be funny, he'll have his characters tell a joke, use a pun (i.e., soon after Frank's dead: "my mourning brain had decided renaming itself was the evening's assignment"), or toss in a word like "chucklehead" -- which cracked me up every time. It wasn't until about two-thirds of the way through the novel when this notion of how much fun the novel had to be to write dawned on me. And that's the moment the novel really clicked for me. Lethem's not showing off or being superfluous, he's having a blast! And therefore, as a reader, you can't help but have a blast also.