Motherless Brooklyn

Jonathon Lethem

All the nice things people have said about this novel are true. It's the novel that everyone who reads it will remember as the "Tourette's novel". If your previous knowledge of Tourettes is limited, like mine, to the odd reference in a magazine you'll know little except that it's the disorder which compels the sufferer to shout obscenities to complete strangers. By the end of the book, assuming Jonathan Lethem knows his onions, you'll have a much more complete and sympathetic picture of the Tourettes sufferer. For Lionel Essrog, the book's hero and narrator, Tourettes isn't just the "fuck me" (or in Lionel's case, more commonly, "eat me") muttered at strangers, it's the urge to straighten their collars, the compulsion to repeat certain names and phrases, the whole vast volcano of wordplay constantly bubbling between the lips. Lionel is a wonderfully written character.

But it's unfair on the book to focus too closely on the Tourettes because it's a detective story too. And Lethem wisely resists the temptation to let the plot at any stage be moved on clumsily by a Tourettic utterance. Instead Lionel's tics and mumblings are simply part of the background just, I guess, as they would be if you were spending time with him in real life.

It kicks off with the death of Lionel's boss, mentor and father figure, Frank Minna. Having laid Minna out on the mortician's slab the first third of the book is told in flash back. How Minna had rescued Lionel and three urchin friends of his from the local orphanage in Brooklyn and turned them into a very low rent team of minicab drivers cum private detectives. In spite of their being used, basically, as cheap and biddable labour the orphans love Minna. And so when the book catches back up with the present time it's easy to see why they are determined to go after his killer. But without the glue of Minna himself the team quickly falls apart and only Lionel has the perseverance (and perhaps sufficient Minna worship) to stick to the task and unmask the villains. Minna had once said to Lionel "you're useful to me because people see you're crazy and then they make the mistake of thinking you're stupid". Big mistake.