Motherless Brooklyn

The inimitable narrative voice of Lionel Essrog grabs the reader from page one and never lets go. We are moved to equal parts laughter and tears by this Tourette's afflicted orphan, who obsessively attacks the puzzle of his mentor's murder. Lionel's mountain of tics provides some hilarious moments, but other passages are so poignantly painful that I literally had to pause and look away as I read them. Unfortunately, odds are the reader will lose interest in the details of Lionel's case long before he does. The unraveling tale of crime and corruption is more strange and tedious than thrilling. As supporting characters gradually revealed themselves and failed to make an impression, I found myself continuing on solely to find out what would happen to him. Villains never evolved beyond cardboard cut-outs, a potential love interest went nowhere, and Lionel's murdered boss largely remained an enigma. Lethem's fresh, vivid style keeps you invested in Essrog's fate right up to the end, but the content suffers by comparison.

However, I'm very excited that Edward Norton has taken on the project of adapting this book for the screen, turning it into a 50s period piece with a script that he describes as "loosely based" on the original. It's ripe for an adaptation that will marry Lethem's bold vision to a truly engaging story with characters we can care about. Norton has done excellent work in this vein with Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil, and I trust him to craft something similarly satisfying here. And bringing Lionel Essrog to life could be the tour de force of his performing career. In the meantime, pick up the book and get to know Lionel yourself. You'll be glad you did, even if you could wish he was in a better novel.

For a long time I really liked Jonathan Lethem in theory. I'd find essays or interviews where he espoused on all sorts of stuff I love: Talking Heads, Roberto Bolaño, Philip K. Dick, even John Carpenter's cult film, They Live. And though I'd eagerly planned to read one of his novels, even had a small stack sitting on my bookshelf, for whatever reason I never got around to it. Eventually I found myself debating whether to buy a hardcover copy of Dissident Gardens before coming to my senses, going home and cracking into Motherless Brooklyn, which I knew was Lethem's first big hit and so probably a pretty good place to start.

It's rare to find a novel that excels at both plot and stylish prose, but from page one it was clear Lethem has a mastery over this balance. Lionel Essrog is a wannabe sleuth who suffers from Tourette Syndrome. He's part of a crew of screw-ups headed by a small time crook, Frank Minna. When Minna is murdered, Lionel takes it upon himself to solve the crime, taking the reader on a quixotic odyssey across Brooklyn and Manhattan wherein he tangles with a Polish giant, a secretive Zendo, and a mysterious corporation, along with an array of outcasts, loners, and losers. The novel is very much a descendant of Chandler's hardboiled mystery tradition, but what really makes the story stand out is its language. Lionel's affliction is also his great strength, so while his tics make his speech a mash of abrupt, absurd vulgarities, he has countered this with an internal mastery of self-expression and awareness which charmed me as a reader.

I'd recommend this book to just about anyone: from casual genre lovers to post modern lit nerds. It's been a long time since a novel had such a rapturous effect on me, and my only complaint is the book ended. Lucky for me, I have a copy of The Fortress of Solitude, which has been gathering dust for far too long.

Poor Lionel Essrog. He has a hard time being taken seriously by anyone--his boss, his co-workers, women, even the bad guys. It's not his fault that what sets him apart is not looks, intelligence, or even street smarts; it's Tourette's syndrome, an affliction that means his attempts at normal communication are punctuated by sudden verbal outbursts (often obscene) and wrenching physical jerks. In his case, these are accompanied by the nearly-irrepressible urge to touch, tap, count, or simply reach out and smooth someone's collar. Lionel works for a small-time Brooklyn mobster named Frank Minna. Since it happens in the first chapter, it's not giving anything away to reveal that Minna's murder sets Lionel off on an investigation that requires him to be the detective he always wanted to be. What follows is a combination whodunit and personality exploration that uses Tourette's to make Lionel's life more complicated and his thwarted aspirations more poignant, without making fun of the disorder itself (though plenty of people around Lionel do). With or without the Tourettic leitmotif, this is an interesting story. I picked up this book because I saw Lethem's name mentioned on one of those "don't miss this writer" lists, and at least in this case the recommendation didn't steer me wrong. I don't read a lot of detective stories, but I enjoyed this one. Lethem is a skillful writer, and some of his unexpected turns of phrase are delightful. The combination of crime, aspiration, unrequited love, and Zen Buddhism was enough to keep the story moving.

For this reader, the novel's strong points were the language related to the main character's growth, and the humor caused by his speech problem. Lionel started as a bit naive and in the dark about everything -- Frank, Frank's girlfriend, the gangsters -- but by the end had uncovered the secrets, acted heroically and seemed more in control. The combination of naivety, a sharp mind and uncontrolled language was good, and much in his character was believable and sympathetic. His speech due to Tourette's was creatively shown and some of the monologues and dialogue with others -- like the black cop -- provided many of the novel's high points.

On the other hand, for this reader, if you took away the Tourette's element the book was much less interesting. The detective story wasn't for me a terrific page turner and compared unfavorably with, say, the best work of Raymond Chandler. Most of the other characters weren't developed very far, the women, the giant and the Japanese characters were clichés. The book's humor diminished in its second half. The shift in narration toward the end -- to tie up the loose ends -- was jarring.

Lionel appeared to be seeking the killer of a father figure through much of the novel, yet the book's title was motherless. Motherless Brooklyn does sound better, though.

I've been meaning to read something by Jonathan Lethem for a while so when a reading companion thrust Motherless Brooklyn into my hands, I knew it was meant to be.

I first opened this book at around 3 in the morning one night, after finishing up a book that I didn't particularly care for (and drinking several tumblers of whiskey). I intended to just read a few pages and call it a night. 25 pages later, I was captivated by the book and had to force myself to crawl into bed.

I've heard Lethem described as a unique voice and if this book is anything to go by, that's certainly true. There was quite a motley cast of characters and I was introduced to many memorable fictional folks that I won't soon be forgetting. Most notable, of course, is the protagonist, one Lionel Essrog, who witnesses the murder of his boss / mentor / father figure within the first 10 pages of the book. He spends our remaining time together trying to track down the killer, all while ridiculous hijinks ensue.

When I discovered a few pages in that Essrog has Tourette's, I was a little concerned about how that would be handled. I'm not one who finds it particularly funny to ridicule or sensationalize the disorder of another. My concern was mostly that Mr. Lethem would use Essrog's disorder as a punchline and would simplify his condition into some stupid cliche. Luckily, I was wrong, and while there were plenty of humorous situations that came as a result of his disorder, it did not define him and I felt it was handled in an honest way.

While I did very much enjoy this book and found it to be a fun and fast read, it fell short of being excellent because I never felt completely immersed in the lives of the motherless in Brooklyn, nor was I particularly moved or touched by some of the more emotional scenes.

I would recommend this book to someone who is interested in a unique spin on the classic detective novel and someone who doesn't require an emotional connection in order to love a book.

Lionel works at a driver service in Manhattan, which is the front for a detective agency, which is the front for a small-time hood's operation. The hood in question, Frank Minna, is murdered in the first few pages, and Lionel seeks to solve the mystery of Frank's death. The mystery is compelling and clever in itself. It throws Buddhist monks, a Polish giant, Italian mafia bosses, and a few orphans into a pot and stirs rapidly.

Add to this a fascinating protagonist: Lionel has Tourette's Syndrome, which I have always associated with outbursts of context-inappropriate language. We view the entire world through Lionel's tics, the involuntary speech being just one of many. (It reminded me of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, also a great mystery, solved by a child with Asperger's Syndrome.) In Lethem's hands, Lionel's estrangement from the world around him, both through his Tourette's and through other disabilities, become effective types for the reader's (at least This Reader's) own feelings of alienation and estrangement.

Lethem's use of language is also delicious. Take this sentence: "I was dredging up Minna's usages on any excuse now, as though I could build a golem of his language, then bring it to life, a figure of vengeance to search out the killer or killers." (I'm a sucker for golems.)

I thought it was Excellent.

This was the second Lethem book I have read; the first was his first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music. I enjoyed them both a great deal, although that one mixes crime novel with science fiction, and while it does it very effectively, some people are so immediately put off by science fiction that this may be a better starter-Lethem.

Note on content: The book has lots of strong language, as you'd expect from hoods in Brooklyn. And one sex scene.

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.

If you've studied literature, you know that narratives haven't always been populated with fully rounded people. For quite a long time, writers filled their works with flat characters either due to their relative unimportance in the plot or to emphasize universal qualities or out of some allegorical or archetypal impulse. But in the past century or two, the proverbial pendulum has swung the other way, and complex, realistic characters have become badges of authorial excellence. And if you can make them grotesque or bizarre and still remain that verisimilitude, well, let the kudos rain down. That's just what Jonathan Lethem has done in Motherless Brooklyn, a murder mystery with one of the oddest and best-realized detectives you've ever encountered.

See, ever since he was a child at St. Vincent's Home for Boys in Brooklyn, Lionel Essrog has had this problem, like he'll get something into his head, an odd phrase--loud maze! found days! pound haze!--and he'll have to riff on it for a while, or maybe a number, like six, let's pick six, and he'll have to do everything six times, like straighten your lapels or tap you on the shoulder or maybe kiss you, and Lionel can't help it, because he has Tourette's, it's a disorder, a compulsion to do all those things and maybe throw in the occasional--eatmebailey!--obscenity from time to time, but Lionel has a new compulsion, because he's a Minna Man, an associate of Frank Minna, small-time fence and only father figure Lionel has ever had, except Minna just got himself stabbed repeatedly in the gut and tossed in a dumpster, and Lionel doesn't know why, but he knows he can't stop until he finds the person responsible for his death.

Though Motherless Brooklyn is ostensibly crime fiction, it goes a little light on the "crime" part. Yes, there's murder, an investigation, arrests, high-speed chases, a ruthless Japanese syndicate, a brutal pistol whipping, a pair of aging Mafiosi and tense stand offs over leveled weapons. But these compose only about one-half of the running time. The rest gets dedicated to developing Lionel, which would normally disappoint a genre lover such as myself. But Lethem carries it off with such skill that I have a difficult time offering anything but admiration. Lionel could've remained a joke, a one-note gag, an invention better suited for sitcoms than a full-length novel. In Lethem's hands, though, he moves from humorous to poignant and surprisingly intelligent. The piling on of personal detail does get a bit much at times. (Did I really need to know about the odd shape of Lionel's genitalia? I think not.) Still, the overall effect is impressive. This Brooklyn has got character.

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN is a riff on the hard-boiled noir detective novel (a la Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Ross MacDonald, etc.) as told by a thirty-year-old with Tourette's Syndrome, Lionel Essrog by name. Lionel and three other orphans at the St. Vincent Home for Boys in Brooklyn were commandeered by a petty but charismatic criminal, Frank Minna (thus becoming the Minna Men), to carry out various and sundry jobs in support of Minna's criminal exploits. By so doing, Frank gave Lionel a life and a modicum of respectability and self-esteem. After Frank is murdered (at the end of an absolutely brilliant first chapter -- the high point of the novel), Lionel sets out on his own investigation to discover the killer(s) and wreak vengeance.

The plot is a little strained at times -- like many of the plots of the classic American detective novels that author Lethem is both honoring and parodying -- but it is good enough to provide a plausible vehicle for the novel's real strengths. They are twofold: one, the character of Lionel Essrog (one of the more unusual and memorable protagonists I have encountered) and his omnipresent struggles with his Tourette's; and two, a crackling and edgy hyperenergetic narrative, rife with imaginative wordplay, that is frequently punctuated with Lionel's own Tourettic and explosive verbal variations. I found the wordplay highly engaging, a sort of American's (or Brooklynite's) "Finnegan's Wake", although much less recondite. (What a challenge the novel must pose for a prospective translator! How would one render, for example, "the Kumquat Sasquatch"?)

I had read nothing by Jonathan Lethem and knew very little about him before I bought MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN while on a recent trip, having consumed the books I had brought with me. I am quite pleased with my discovery. While not a great novel, MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN is literate and very entertaining. If Lethem's other works are on the same plane, I have stumbled upon a worthwhile author.

Ostensibly this is a hard-boiled detective novel, but the detective story is just a framework for the real story, which is about Lionel Essrog's life with Tourette's syndrome and his delayed maturity.

The book is narrated in first-person from the perspective of Lionel. It starts with him and Gilbert staking out the Yorkville Zendo (a Zen Buddhist meeting house.) Their boss, small-time mobster Frank Minna, shows up, tells them he's wearing a wire, gives Lionel the headphones and goes inside the Zendo. Something goes wrong and Frank winds up getting stabbed.

Cut to a long section of flashbacks about how Lionel and three other boys from St. Vincent's orphanage met Frank and became his crew for a suspicious moving business that later turned into a car company / detective agency. Strangely, the agency seldom drives customers anywhere, and seldom solves crimes. They run errands for Frank and the mysterious "Clients." They all seem to look up to Frank as a father figure (at least Lionel does) and their reliance on him keeps them from truly growing up (at least in Lionel's case.) All the guys are basically screw-ups but Lionel is the most obviously broken because of his Tourette's syndrome which makes him blurt out bizarre phrases at odd times, obsessively touch and count things. He's not crazy; he just can't control himself. People think he's crazy, or retarded, and for that reason they tend to underestimate him. I am guilty of it myself: Even though Lionel describes himself as a somewhat large man, I kept picturing him as a scrawny, jittery little guy.

Back to the present day, Lionel bumbles around, picking up clues and putting together what amounts to a very simple, almost lame-brained conspiracy plot. None of the bad stuff would have happened but for the stupidity of a few key characters. This is why these guys are still small-time...

On a stylistic level, _Motherless Brooklyn_ is fun to read. Lionel's brain slices and dices language in startling, sometimes hilarious ways. The prose is frantic, kaleidoscopic. The pace is steady and the book moves you along without boring you. HOWEVER, I got into this with the expectation it would be another "weird-noir" novel like _Gun With Occasional Music_ which is much weirder and much more noir. So, only four stars. The book is good but it isn't what I thought it would be. I wound up feeling slightly dissatisfied after finishing it.

Excuse the above. Couldn't hold it in any longer...
"Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence?" Lionel Essrog, the narrator, asks about a third of the way through this book. Up to that point, it was reasonable to assume that Lethem would play his detective story straight. But this question ups the ante a touch. It was at this point that I worried Lethem would take the path worn by Paul Auster (see his brilliant 'New York Trilogy') where the elements of the hard-boiled detective novel would be used purely for the sake of post-modernism. Auster's detectives never solve their crimes, and frankly, it doesn't matter. His ideas are bountiful enough for the reader to hold on to. Lethem, on the other hand, needs his narrative resolution. His ideas aren't in Auster's league. Sure, he sprinkles some Zen Buddhism over here, and questions of identity over there, and his main character has a disease that borders on the stream of consciousness style that contemporary literati find so intriguing (I don't). But they just don't have the same weight. Thankfully -- and I worry here that I'm giving away too much of the ending -- he follows the genre's conventions just enough to keep the reader happy.
There's a great line near the middle of the book, when a patron in a restaurant, complaining of Lionel's use of a cell phone in a public place, says: "people talking to themselves in a public place like they got some kind of illness!" Lionel, narrator and protagonist, is a wonderful creation. His Tourette's Syndrome, which at first came off as a hackneyed device, actually serves to elevate the entire book. It was wonderful to hear the series of Tourettic thoughts going through his head, and what the final culmination of those thoughts were when they would eventually escape through his mouth. I often thought that if the people he was speaking too were any brighter, then Lionel's cover would be consistently blown because you always knew what his hidden thoughts were. Luckily, the "Minna Men" he hung with were as low rent as the detective agency they worked for.
Lethem does a good job creating his world, his seedy little section of Brooklyn (and its outskirts, and even a sidetrip to Maine) for his characters to roam around in. The details seem just right, if a little self-conscious at times (a minor character is named "Welcome", a byproduct of her hippie parents but really of no use to the story). He takes the classic detective genre, and adds elements from the '90's to make it more relevant (like a "soundtrack" peppered with Funkadelic, Boyz II Men, and most tellingly, Prince). And you've got to admire an author who has the confidence to begin a chapter: "There once was a girl from Nantucket. No, really, that's where she was from."

The detective novel has been done to death. There, I said it. There is nothing new under the sun, the bloom is off the rose, the check is in the mail. There have been some fine examples of the genre in recent times, true. Walter Mosley's `Easy Rawlins' mysteries rank right up there with the best. But for the most part, authors bring nothing new to the table. They rehash Hammett, and Chandler, but never find their own true voice.
Or so I thought.
MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN has given me cause to celebrate. Not that the mystery itself is such an amazing feat of twists and turns. But the manner in which the mystery is told, the style and wit of the author, puts the literature back into the genre. This is a detective novel with class. I haven't been this startled by such originality and invention in a detective novel since Andrew Vachss introduced his `Burke' character in FLOOD.
Lionel Essrog is a New York detective, of sorts, one of four right-hand men serving under detective Frank Minna. Minna isn't really a detective, he's more of a criminal in disguise, but Lionel and the others are too enraptured to care. Minna recruited Lionel and the others from an orphanage (all four men comprise `Motherless Brooklyn') to work as his henchmen, his drivers, his servants. When Minna is killed, Lionel must track the killer down.
It sounds fairly standard for a detective novel, but author Jonathan Letham's ace-in-the-hole is Lionel's unusual dilemma: Lionel has Tourette's syndrome, a disorder that manifests itself through uncontrollable verbal and physical tics and spasms. As Lionel narrates his tale, relating his past life at the orphanage up to the present, he presents a viewpoint of the universe not many people could claim to understand, the frantic need for order and discipline in a world undesigned for this sort of comfort.
This is treading a fine line. Lionel's disability could easily have become a gimmick, or even worse, a joke (although his asides and mutterings can be funny; he finds it almost impossible to say his name correctly). Letham navigates these perils with aplomb, and it is a tribute to his skill that Lionel's constant outbursts never become tiresome. We are fully immersed in the mind of a man with Tourette's, and it is often a startling experience.
There is a touching aspect to Lionel's tale that only reveals itself fully in hindsight. Minna is obviously a father figure to Lionel and the others, but it is only when Lionel finally functions completely on his own does he mature into a man. Until that time, he was a boy in a man's frame, completely intoxicated with the world Minna provided, rarely stopping to ponder the seething darkness that Minna kept at bay. Minna was a father, but he was not a good father, and Lionel only comes to realize this when he faces the world completely and utterly alone.
The mystery itself, like most good mysteries, is secondary. It is not the mystery that holds our attention. It is the language, the characters. THE MALTESE FALCON is a fine mystery, but it wouldn't hold our interest without Sam Spade's hard-boiled detective. A mystery is only as good as the frame which supports it. MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN has a very good frame indeed.

In "Motherless Brooklyn", Lethem created a world of small time. Small time mobsters employ much smaller time Frank Minna who employs tiny time Minna Men, of whom Lionel Essrog is the star. His star status is not obvious to everyone. To most around him he officially is a freak, with outbursts of verbal gobbledygook and repetitive jerky motions which scare and befuddle people. Minna, his one real friend, has known him for a smart guy all along, but this is only revealed by the end of the book. And it is at the end of the book that Minna's wife sees Lionel the way Minna saw him and that Lionel ends up earning respectful treatment even from the mobsters.

The readers are in a much better position. We see Lionel as a star from the very first pages: we would much rather listen to him than to any other character in the book. His Tourette's tics are hilarious, and his irony, borne out of inability to suppress them, no less amusing ("You are Lionel Essrog, aren't you? - 'Unreliable Cheesegrub', I corrected"). This freaky schlemiel, this giant fly on the wall turns out to be the star student of Minna's and acts as a veritable wise guy: he takes matters into his hands, figures out interests and roles of a clandestine organization and 5-6 individuals involved, avenges the death of his friend and negotiates a saner life for him and his friends.

The spirited portrait of Lionel is fresh and memorable. The supporting characters are cast in vivid colors: take the colossal Polish hit man squeezing the juices out of kumquats or a flock of nervous doormen playing mafia...

A beautiful portrait in a fetching frame.

How about a thriller set in Brooklyn featuring a protagonist with Tourette syndrome, a couple of gangster brothers, some Zen intrigue and a subplot involving the Japanese sea urchin egg industry? If this sounds intriguing, you will enjoy this highly contrived, yet entertaining tale featuring cartoon-like characters. The plot involves two brothers in over their heads in crime in Brooklyn. One brother goes to a home for boys ("motherless" boys) and selects a few to help out with his crime capers. One of the boys, Loinel Essrog, suffers from Tourette Syndrome. He narrates the story starting with a murder and ending with him solving it. I won't say more than that.
It is interesting to get some insight into Tourettes (assuming this novel is accurate in its portrayal). I appreciate that the author tried something different. If you want something a little different from the average detective story, give this book a try.

When I heard of an upcoming movie with Edward Norton (one of my favorite actors), and discovered it would be based on a Jonathan Lethem novel, I was compelled to read "Motherless Brooklyn" for myself. I'm new to Lethem's work, and so it was with great relish that I found myself swept into the rich and strange world of a man with Tourette's.

Lionel Essrog is a masterful creation, one of those fictional characters that can carry, even overwhelm, a story--as he does here. He's an orphan, a kid growing into a man on the streets of Brooklyn. Lethem opens his story with a stake-out and then the untimely--and by no means natural--passing of a fatherly figure in Essrog's life. From there, Lethem leads us through the rabbit warrens of Essrog's thinking processes, while Essrog tries to deduce the perpetrator of the crime. Essrog's character and his interactions with others, not to mention his own internal struggles, elevate this average mystery plot into something more.

Essrog is alternately funny, wise, and eccentric. At times, I found myself simply weary of being in his presence. This underlines Lethem's ability to capture the ticcing personality of his protagonist, but it also led to occasional distractions for me. Or maybe I was simply mirroring. Without Essrog's rants and rambles, the book would be cut in half, leaving a bare-bones mystery.

If you enjoy memorable and quirky characters in your novels, this book is one not to be missed. I can't wait to see Ed Norton's portrayal of Essrog, and I can only hope they capture Lethem's magic on the screen.

of words, Lionel Essrog is a prisoner of the obsessiveness that binds those with Tourette's Syndrome. Jonathan Lethem introduces us to one of the most interesting characters I have come across in some time in his novel Motherless Brooklyn.
As an orphan in Brooklyn, Lionel has no idea what causes his own strange behavior until Frank Minna, a local mobster takes Lionel and some of his buddies from the orphanage under his wing. Minna frees Lionel, by not only giving him some purpose in life but by identifying the cause for his strange behavior. Lionel is no longer just a "freak show" as he is affectionately called, he is one of Frank Minna's, Minna Men or detectives for want of a better word.
All is going well for Lionel until the day Frank Minna disappears into the building called Zendo and is later retrieved by Lionel from a dumpster. At that point Lionel's life as a Minna Man is forever changed. He finds the world he has built coming under assault.
It is great fun for the reader to bounce around Brooklyn with Lionel hunting for clues. We are immersed in his strange sea of words, an uncontrollable stream of consciousness which refuses to be shut down.
"Alibi hullabaloo gullible bellyflop smellafish, sang my brain, obliterating speech."
This is a sampling of the steady river of words flowing through in Essrog's brain and spalshing off the pages of Motherless Brooklyn. He is an entertaining character that can go nowhere quietly or unobtrusively, but some how he manages to find his way to the depth of the mystery that destroyed his mentor.
Jonathan Lethem skilled writing, entertaining storytelling and engaging characterizations make Motherless Brooklyn an excellent mystery and one that is truly hard to put down. I just couldn't get enough of Lionel and when I finished the book I sadly and reluctantly said goodbye to him.

For the first half MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN is one of the great comedic novels. Lethem's comic timing is brilliant, his attention to nuance spectacular. And then he has Lionel start to solve the mystery and what becomes apparent is that Lethem, no matter how much he'd like to be,is no Dennis Lehane. The set-up is Lehane-esque; the let down Lethem's own. So how much this book means to you depends on the degree to which you can take character without plot. I'm fine with well-drawn characters, but if this is to be mystery I want some mystery that matters. As a Mainer I also know that he got Maine wrong. Completely. If an author is going to set a precise locale there is no excuse for knowing *nothing* but cliches about your locale; and making up imaginary towns or islands does not excuse importing attitudes. Lethem's Brooklyn is real - his Maine should be as well. All in all I was tremendously disappointed by the last half of this book. I give it as many as three stars only because I was so enraptured by the first half.

The novel "Motherless Brooklyn" by Jonathan Lethem is both familiar and original. Lethem took a familiar genre, a traditional detective novel, and added an unlikely twist - the protagonist of this novel, Lionel Essrog, has Tourette syndrome. The result is an unusual and original book that has won numerous awards.

Lionel fancies himself a detective and, when his boss Frank Minna is murdered, Essrog is determined to discover who killed him. This part of the story is a rather predictable hard boiled who-done-it. Add to that the fact that Lionel has Tourette's and the book takes on a new dimension.

Lethem effortlessly pulls the reader into Lionel's world, which is haunting. Lionel has tics, both physical and vocal. His vocal tics are often shouted profanity. Other times he conjoins words or parts of words, creating sounds that burst out of him. The result is unsettling, though at times the word combinations are humorous.

Reading this novel, the detective story faded as I focused on Lionel's life with Tourette syndrome. I'm not sure if that was the effect that Lethem hoped to achieve, but it's probably the reason this book won awards. Regardless, it's an interesting book and the character Lionel is especially intriguing.

Lionel Essrog must rank as one of the most original narrators of a novel in contemporary fiction. He deals in good faith with his Tourette's syndrome, gently educating us, amid the harsh and brutal reality of Brooklyn. Essrog is a kind of existential orphan in a motherless city. He is consumed with finding order, patterns, balance, symmetry and controlling urges to scream his innermost sensibilities in public. His friends call him "Freak Show" and yet he has one of the most endearing narrative voices in modern fiction -- gentle, highly intelligent, vulnerable and humane, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five. Essrog rides through New York's subways noting how they offer a structure and canvass for irrepressible, subterranean human expressions like his. The protagonist seeks and finds the hidden gems of beauty that lie well hidden in the harsh starkness of the city. The characters like the city are original and real with freakish overtones which stop short of stereotypes. The novel is steeped in the language, street culture and underground economy that is Brooklyn. The plot is entertaining, the dialogue is authentic and the octopus joke is hilarious. The author does a great job weaving an intricate plot structure of apparently unconnected forces that come together naturally and masterfully. The word play through Essrog's Tourettic sensibilities were lyrical, poetic and even Joycean in places. I really enjoyed this novel's gritty urban realism and its flashes of real comic wit from a highly talented and inventive writer. This is a great piece of contemporary literature that's a genuine pleasure to read.

This is an usual book, well worth reading, very innovative, and lots of fun. The story concerns Lionel Essrog, an orphan taken in by a low-level Mafia type. Essrog suffers from Tourett's disease, which causes him to have verbal tics and engage in compulsive behavior. The Mafia guy, a father figure, employs Essrog and his orphan buddies as private eyes, but when the Mafia guy is killed, Essrog takes on his first serious case: finding who murdered his best friend.
So far, so good. We have a classic genre opening, and a fine literary twist. A P.I. with Tourett's may seem absurd, and I found it a bit over-the-top when I started reading, but it actually makes more and more sense as the plot unfolds. And ultimately, the Tourett's element is the creative heart of this very entertaining novel and precisely what makes it so much fun. The bits that have nothing to do with the mystery plot (most notably Essrog's recollections of his childhood and early involvement with his Mafia patron) prove to be the most absorbing and moving sequences. The narrator's verbal tics are relentlessly clever, and quite frequently hilarious. As a literary novel, then, the book is entirely successful and a wonderful read.
It loses a star (really a half star, but the store doesn't allow for that nuance) for the mystery element, which I found undercooked. I never really cared who did it, and I never really cared about the mystery itself. What makes this book remarkable is the fact that I didn't especially care that I didn't care. The writing and characters, especially Essrog, were enough to keep me turning the pages.

We're all familiar with the conventions of the hard-boiled detective genre: men of few words, fisticuffs in back alleys, rougue cops, mysterious women with long legs and dark secrets, and so forth. In this brilliant novel, Lethem has turned all of these conventions on their ear. Instead of a man of few words, our protagonist (Lionel Essrog) is a man of too many words... he has Tourette's Syndrome.
The ordinary detective slowly uncovers clues through a mixture of intimidation and verbal trickery. Lionel, on the other hand, is ridiculed or roughed up by nearly everyone he meets. And still he brilliantly tracks down leads and uses his apparent weaknesses to his advantage. All other conventions are also reversed. Dark secrets turn out to be less dark than we imagined. Instead of being coy and mysterious, the women practice Zen and say what they mean.
Lethem has done an excellent job of replicating the tension, pace, and intrique of the very best detective novels, but he has done so in a way that no one else has before. And the brilliant writing and masterful descriptions of New York City make it easy to see why this novel has garnered so much praise from people and publications that ordinarily don't care much for genre writing.
Fans of the genre, read this book to get a taste of something wonderfully different. Fans of literature, read this book to experience the very best of the detective genre. Also, if you liked this book, try Martin Amis's NightTrain.

i was drawn to this book primarily because i like a good mystery. but i'll remember it for a long time because of the fascinating, hysterical and touching portrayal of Lionel Essrog, the private eye and Tourette's Syndrome sufferer at the center of this story. he's not one of those people who simply barks out obscenities all the time (he only does that occasionally). what's going on inside lionel's head is altogether more complex. when people speak to him their words bounce around inside his skull, metamorphising and reforming into new phrases which emit from his lips ten to the dozen. it would seem like the ultimate form of creativity, were it not for the fact that there's not a thing lionel can do to stop it. his affliction extends beyond words too - he is endlessly needled by the urge to touch things (like people's shoulders) a certain number of times. it all sounds a bit weird and made up, but in the hands of this author and in the words of lionel essrog, it's just everyday brooklyn life. jonathan lethem has done an amazing job here. he puts us inside the kind of mind few people even know exists. and then through the color and supreme naturalness of his writing allows us to not only feel what lionel feels, but actually understand how a mind like his works (or at least think we do). as a mystery, motherless brooklyn is okay, but the ending is disappointing. as an insight into the tourettic mind it's absolutely brilliant.

Like the Balloon Man in Central Park, Jonathan Lethem has taken the straightforward noir detective genre and twisted up a tail, turned out a neck, puffed up a chest and pulled out a pair of wings until it has become a fable for our times. Lionel Essrog is the quintessential Ugly Duckling. Abandoned by his parents, who in all probability could not deal with his Tourette's Syndrome, Lionel grows up in an orphanage. In typical "boys will be boys" fashion, he is dubbed "Freakshow" and denigrated at every turn. Then along comes Frank Minna, a small-time Brooklyn mobster, who become's Lionel's surrogate father. Lionel and his orphan friends become The Minna Men, running errands for the mob, but Lionel remains oblivious to being used. When Frank is fatally shot, even he abandons Lionel to the Code of Omerta, a concept completely alien to a Touretter. With fierce loyalty and a mission to do what is right, Lionel sets out to find Frank's killers. When Minna Men abandon him for other agendas, he simply redoubles his efforts. And just when you think he has found a love interest, one as uncontrolled in her naivete as he is in his speech, even she abandons him. Lionel navigates this sea of human cruelty simply by defining everything in terms of himself. This is raw survival - a novel totally absorbed in the self-consciousness of its protagonist. His jackhammer epithets are at first funny, then discomforting, then annoying, until Lionel brings you full circle into how utterly uncontrollable it all is. You begin to feel devastated when he blurts out secrets that will do him harm. You try to esp insights to him, knowing he knows exactly what to do but just can't help himself. In the end, Lionel has won you over totally and completely. Lethem probably began this novel on a dare - can a writer exhibit the technical wizardry necessary to pull off a protagonist with Tourette's Syndrome. By the end of the book, you can tell that Lionel has won over Lethem as well. Lionel Essrog is a fully realized and achingly human character, a swan, no less.

Not a detective story in the conventional sense, Motherless Brooklyn is as much the story of Lionel Essrog as it is the story of a murder, and in this sense it is particularly appealing. Essrog is doubly removed from the mainstream-he has grown up in an orphanage without the kind of nurturing which gives humans their ability to empathize with each other, and he has Tourette's Syndrome, which makes him involuntarily touch and pat objects, count or repeat actions, and, most annoyingly for him, blurt out nonsense, rhymes, and sometimes obscenities at oftentimes inappropriate moments. He is not an easy character to identify with.
Yet Jonathan Lethem, the author, is not using the Tourette's symptoms as a literary trick. He makes the reader care about Lionel without pitying him. Lionel is trying to find the murderer of Frank Minna, a somewhat shady character who has mentored Lionel and three others from the orphanage since they were young teenagers. Lionel comes to believe that he may be the only one who cares enough about Frank to be able to solve his murder, and he begins to think that Frank counted on him to do this by the statements and actions he made in the moments immediately before and after he received his fatal wounds. As Lionel works to find Frank's killer, as he tries to attract a woman and sustain a relationship, and as he evaluates the relationships he has had with the other orphans, Lionel becomes more mature and more aware of his unusual relationships with the outside world.
The author's recreation of the Tourette world is so vivid and realistic that I (like other readers, perhaps) looked up information about the author himself experienced this syndrome. (No.) His imaginative descriptions, especially those presented from Lionel's point of view, are often both humorous and uniquely offbeat. And his ability to keep the reader fascinated with this character and his story is absolutely dazzling.

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.

For those of you looking for a great mystery book, this isn't the one. While there is some detective work going on and a murder to be solved, this is just the background to a bigger and better story. Lionel Essrog, the narrator of the story, has suffered with Tourette's Syndrome his whole life. Not that it has been much of a life....when we meet him he is an orphan living in the St. Vincent's Home for Boys in Brooklyn. He and three other orphans become Minna's Boys, running errands for Frank Minna a local crime boss. Essrog's Tourette's tics become endearing to the reader and when he is ticcing off the names of the people in the group and is trying to come up with a total of 6 (his tic number for the day), he is unable to do so. With Frank Minna and the 4 orphans it only adds up to 5. But Lionel hasn't added in the biggest character in the group -- BROOKLYN. Lethem's descriptions of Brooklyn are unparalleled. Everything takes place at the foot of a bridge or in a storefront or at 5AM when the merchants are just waking up. As he's driving over the Pulaski Bridge, I'm right behind him. I'm not sure if someone who isn't familiar with Brooklyn would like this book as much as someone who has strong ties to this borough. Jonathan Lethem describes these orphans as part of "Motherless Brooklyn," children living in Brooklyn without mothers. I'm sure it's intentional on his part that after finishing this book, the reader gets the feeling that it is Brooklyn who really needs a mother -- it's a city without nurturing or love. It's screaming out not to be motherless any longer.

Lionel Essrog cracked me up. My husband woke up in the middle of the night saying, "Earthquake!" but it was just me laughing silently and shaking the bed.
Lionel has Tourrette's Syndrome and his tics lead him to burst out the funniest lines in the book. One of his standbys is "Eatmebailey". We never find out who Bailey is. That would have been a much better plot line than the detective story Lethem came up with.
I agree with some other reviewers that this should not have been a detective novel. As soon as the flashback to his childhood is over and Lionel starts looking for the killer, whatever literary genius Lethem had rolling came to a screeching halt. It was stock, with a twist; but not enough of a twist to warrant the overblown heraldings of "Motherless Brooklyn" as the newest installment in American literature.
If Lethem had just left out the detective story and found a better plot for Lionel to come into his own, then it would warrant all of the high praise it has received. Maybe next time, but I will definitely keep my eye on Jonathan Lethem.
Read this book for the sheer of enjoyment of listening to Lionel, and try not to let the plot get in your way.

Jonathan Lethem's previous novels have always incorporated very strange elements. Whether it's a genetically-enhanced kangaroo as a villain, or a singularity as one corner of a love triangle, Lethem doesn't shirk at incorporating the weird into his stories.
In Motherless Brooklyn, however, the only unusual aspect to the story is that the protagonist has Tourette's Syndrome. Lethem infuses the narrative with Lionel's tics and verbal outbursts, but the story's premise - a murder mystery - is somewhat more mundane than his previous novels.
I'm not a big fan of murder mysteries, but I was captivated by this novel. What held my interest was Lethem's writing. His use of language, his sense of pacing, and the voice of his protagonist made this book a pleasure to read. And Lethem's portrayal of Lionel was masterful. As the story unfolds, we come to understand how Tourette's works, a little - at least, how it seems to work for Lionel.
But while Lionel's Tourette's was a large part of the story, Lethem didn't let it become the story. There are questions, and Lionel looks for answers. There is danger, and Lionel tries to face it or avoid it. There is humour, too - and rarely at Lionel's expense.
If you've enjoyed Lethem's previous novels, I'd recommend this one without reservation. I think it's his best so far. If you haven't read a Lethem novel, try this one - even if you're not a mystery fan. I'm not, and I loved it.

Lionel Esrog, a young man with Tourette's syndrome, is one of a group of youngsters hand-picked by Frank Minna from St. Vincent's Home for Boys to eventually become part of his "Minna Men". At first working for Minna as moving boys, these young men later become his personal "detectives", working under the cover of a car rental service. On one of their jobs, Esrog and a partner suddenly realize realize that their boss has been taken captive and is being sped away by car through the streets of New York city. They must rush after him and not allow him to be lost from view. The race is on!
Lethem gives his readers a wonderfully creative and somewhat unusual novel. Throughout the story, Lionel displays the aberrant behavior of a person afflicted with Tourette's Syndrome. Since Lionel is the protagonist, the reader not only experiences Lionel's verbal outbursts and physical tics, but is also given some insight into their manifestation . The story is a mystery, and at times almost becomes a satire of life in New York city. It is fast-paced and funny, with creative word-play, occasional amusing situation descriptions, and even a few (good) jokes. The writing is done so well that, once this story has begun, the book is often hard to put down. As the novel draws to a close, the plot tends to become a bit more complicated and confusing. Nevertheless, it's an exciting, entertaining story and one that should not be missed.

I have to admire authors who refuse to repeat themselves from novel to novel. The style might be recognizably the same but they tackle different subjects each time out, approaching them from different angles. While some of Lethem's other novels tend to have a more science-fictional aspect to them, or at least a shard of the fantastic, this one is set in the gritty real-life locale of Brooklyn, New York. But it's not all hard bitten mobsters and tough men with gritted teeth and smoking guns. Our protagonist here, and narrator, is Lionel, a man who works for small time hood Frank Minna, who rescued him and his three partners from the same orphanage twenty years before. Early on, Minna gets stabbed to death and out of curiousity and a desire to see the killer of a man who was decent to him brought to justice, he takes the case, becoming a bit of a detective. Sounds routine? Lethem tweaks things a bit by giving Lionel Tourette's Syndrome, leaving the man a mass of twiching compulsions, shouting odd things at inappropriate times. Is it a gimmick? Sure, but he plays it straight, not playing the man for laughs or even for sympathy, the syndrome is what he has and there's nothing he can do about it. So he and everyone else just kind of goes with it. But it gives the novel a strange, subtle rhythm, since Lionel is the narrator, his tics seem to leak into the narrative itself, so it twitches and glides it way down the streets of Brooklyn, past Zen houses and old mobsters, as he tries to find the killer. It can said that the mystery aspect of the story is probably the least interesting part of it, since it's not real easy to solve from the clues that are given in the novel itself, but I don't think that's the point here. The best detective novels, as opposed to mysteries, had a certain feel and swagger to them. The Marlowe novels, while out to piece a crime together, were also about creating a noir feel, of grey areas and tough choices, of guys who spoke in clipped sentences, if they even bothered to talk to you at all before hitting you with a blackjack. It's not like the mystery in The Big Sleep made any sense to Chandler, and he wrote the book. And Lethem does capture the feel of New York City, at least the Brooklyn portion of it, how it felt back in the day, when the orphans first encounter Minna, and its present-day feel, the little people scurrying to make a living, legally or otherwise, in the shadows of people who could crush them if they bothered to notice what they were doing. Lionel tries to puzzle it all out, in twitches and fits and tics, finding clues within clues, but the solution itself isn't as important as how we get there. He takes people who could be cliches and makes them, if not totally real, at least a little more realistic. Which in itself, is hard enough.

This is the quintessential American detective novel and, therefore, reveals itself like an Odyssey epic. A pageant of life passes before the sleuth and the audience in dubious sounds, sights, and motives. Anyone who loved the oddball humor and pathos of the NBC drama "Homicide" will definitely feel at home in this tale of Lionel Essrog, a detective with Tourette's syndrome on the trail of a murderer.There's a gimmicky Raymond Chandler language at play in the novel. Detectives are referred to as the Minna Men, "tugging the boat" is pushing your luck, and "telling your story walking" is the preferred method of succinctly putting words to work.Dostoevsky's Idiot also resonates throughout the novel. The ridiculed simpleton is drawn into a world that deems him a lightweight . Nevertheless, he gains access and becomes the figure who knows the score better than its original players.Lethem's writing is crazy-grin-and-laugh-out-loud funny, unsentimentally poignant, and hugely rewarding. He gets maximum effect out of his central character, and there's nothing lost in the translation of Tourette's syndrome to the reader.

It takes some time and energy to get started with Jonathan Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn". It is not an easy book -- at least in the first few pages. Once the reader gets the hang of it, the reading becomes less complicated -- but never really easy. This is one of the best pleasures this detective novel can give to an avid reader.

Not only is "Motherless Brooklyn" a mind bending work with its twist and language, but it is also a genre bending narrative. Think of the classic noir narrative done in first person -- add to it a late Twentieth Century pop culture and the Tourette's Syndrome tics and you may have a slight idea of what the book is about. From all of it, what surfaces is Lethem's sensibility to build a main character, namely Lionel Essrog, who is not only believable but also sympathetic.

He is the narrator and belongs to a group of detectives known as Minna Men, former orphans, which were taken under Frank Minna's wings. But early in the novel, their protector is brutally murdered and in a course of a couple of days, Lionel will try to find the killer.

As all good detective novels, "Motherless Brooklyn" is a roller coaster of twists and unpredictability. Near the end readers may start trying to recap with the is-this-really-it feeling. This is not a flaw in the book, but another hook. As is common in the genre both narrator and reader are deceived. The former may not like it, but readers certainly find more pleasure when they cannot guess what is going to happen. And this novel has plenty of surprises.

With a less brilliant writer, "Motherless Brooklyn" would have been an unreadable mess. Lionel's tics would have been pathetic and unreal -- but Lethem seems to love his creation and that gives the character human dimensions that are very beautiful and appreciated throughout the reading. This is one of those books that remind us that living is not easy.

I was in awe reading this wonderful book. Lethem has captured the life of the Tourettic and somehow enmeshed it into a fine mystery and adventure.
When I first read about this book I thought I would be frustrated reading about a star with a handicap, that the hero woould be phony but brave, pitiful but admired...all that contradictory stuff that is used to glamorize a weakness. But Lethem made this character real. He is no martyr, just an everyday Tourettes guy going about his private detective business.
I actually learned a bunch about Tourettes and the inner feelings of its victims. I learned that they are frustrated as hell but they surge through life anyway. The story is much deeper though. It deals with heros, frustration, love and most of all how dependent some people can get on others.
Hero Lionel Essrog is an orphan who has been 'adopted' by a local small time crook. Lionel and some fellow orphans do some odd jobs for this guy and become way too attached to him. He becomes their father figure, their, hero, their role model. Lionel ends up showing he has more character than his role model ever had. Other characters just add to the enjoyment.
I had fun reading Motherless Brooklyn. How much you want to bet this book shows up on Oprah's list pretty soon. Just remember I said it first.

Lionel Essrog, the central character in Jonathan Lethem's highly entertaining "Motherless Brooklyn," is not your average detective. Lionel is an orphan with Tourette's syndrome. He's a relatively gentle young man whose condition causes him to obsess on small details, gobble down one sandwich after another, tap people on the shoulder five times or yell things at inopportune moments. Lionel is one of four young men from a Brooklyn orphanage employed as drivers and detectives by the mysterious Frank Minna. Minna is a smalltime Brooklyn wise guy worshipped by the four orphans. When Frank winds up dead, Lionel goes on a mission to find his mentor's killer. Lionel may sound crazy, but his condition masks an intelligence few recognize. Frank kept dangerous company, including a nasty brother who practices Zen Buddhism, and two old, decrepit mobsters who worship their long dead mother. Lionel's investigation puts him at odds with his fellow "Minna Men" and endangers his life. By the end of his unorthodox investigation (during which he gets attacked by Zen Buddhists), Lionel has suffers more loss and discovers difficult truths about his friends. Lionel is wonderfully original character - simultaneously likeable and annoying. When he finds love briefly, a reader can't help but be happy for him. But it's just as easy to understand when he gets dumped. "Motherless Brooklyn" succeeds beautifully as a noir novel, but it's more than that. Using Lionel's condition, as well as the colorful speech of Minna, Lethem has a ball with language. Lethem's word play, humor and genre bending - not to mention the use he makes of the Brooklyn milieu - make "Motherless Brooklyn" a great, memorable book.

This novel is something of a departure for Lethem, all of whose previous work has been experimental and occasionally bizarre in structure, theme, and characterization. It's nearly a traditional straight narrative -- and a good one, too. Four somewhat inept orphans from St. Vincent's Home for Boys in Brooklyn -- the "Motherless Brooklyn" of the title -- are taken under the wing of Frank Minna, local fixer and small-time hood, who becomes the center of their universe. And fifteen years later, the "Minna Men" are still in thrall, carrying out shady errands under cover of being operatives of a detective agency. One of the four is Lionel Esrog, the narrator, who suffers from Tourette's Syndrome. His uncontrollable outbursts and tics are tolerated by his peers and by his acquaintances in the neighborhood from long habit, but everyone seems to equate his behaviors with a lack of intelligence. Lionel, mostly self-educated and far from stupid, is in fact a very perceptive and self-aware person. Then Frank is murdered almost under Lionel's nose and he must try to find the killer and exact vengeance while struggling to control his Tourette's. His quest through the web of unexpected relationships and parts of Brooklyn he never knew make for a riveting story. But the real star here is Lionel's own interior self, his painfully developed coping skills, his constant self-observation. Lethem is always masterful in his use of the English language but he excels in letting Lionel's syndrome reveal his thoughts. This is a highly original author's most mature work to date.

Detective novels aren't usually my favorite genre of books. About one every year or two is usually enough to remind me of the limited plot lines available and usually curbs my appetite for more quite nicely. However, that is not to say that such novels can't be entertaining, engaging and well-written, as is the case with Motherless Brooklyn.
By bringing Tourette's Syndrome into the mix, Jonathan Lethem has added a welcome wrinkle to the classic style of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, whose Philip Marlowe is a noted inspiration. The story of Lionel Essrog's life as a small-time Brooklyn mook and his search to find the killer of his mentor and boss is eclipsed by Lionel's Tourettic ticcing and makes the book an extremely enjoyable read. I have no idea whether Lethem has the syndrome pegged perfectly, but he writes Lionel's character very convincingly, with both the humor and the pity Essrog deserves and needs to be the book's true hero. Lionel has a line near the end of the book, "It's a Tourette's thing, you wouldn't understand." While that may be true at the beginning of the book, Lethem makes us understand, and care, before it's all over.
I enjoyed Motherless Brooklyn more than I like most detective novels. Were I any kind of fan of the genre, I'd have given it four stars. I'm just not sure I should have to read about double-crosses, late night stakeouts, car chases and lipsticked women to enjoy the good writing and interesting characters (not because of what they are, but who the are) this book offers.

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.

Motherless Brooklyn is a fantastic book. It is definitely not your typical mystery. This book is wonderful, beautiful, and sad at times. The writing and use of language alone are amazing. It's pointed look at humanity, and what it must be like to have Tourette's Syndrome made me almost cry at times. It is a bit of a slow read, once you hit the middle. Some of Lionel's teenage years definitely made me feel awkward. Which is what the author intended, I am sure. I wish he had spent a tiny bit less time on Lionel's growing up and a little more at the start with Frank, and later at the end. It felt a little like one of those Star Trek episodes where they spend 55 minutes trying to figure out what's going on, and rush the end and wrap it up with seconds to spare. Not sure whether we are supposed to love or be angry with Frank, sort of like all the characters seemed to feel.
The sense of humor in the book really made it a bit of a treat. Not belly laughing out loud funny, but the kind that has you chuckling to yourself days later. Part of you feels like saying "Poor Lionel." but then you know that he's not as dumb as people take him for, and that he's stronger than everyone figures. Lionel is one of the best underdogs to root for in a book in a long time. I root for him like I do for Forrest Gump, Spartacus, or Nicholas Nickleby.
The book seems very realistic in the way most of the characters react to their situations, their flaws are all our flaws-greed, lonliness, etc. You don't get a complete view of Frank or Tony, or Julia, on purpose. Many of the settings and characters are surreal and artistic, which also lends to the mood of the book. It feels like stepping into a painting, or looking at a familiar street when it's foggy out. It seems familiar, but eery. For those of you who love how people use language, Lethem weaves words with as much skill as a Shakespeare, Ginsberg or O. Henry,
All I can say is I bought it without reading it first, and it did not disappoint.

In my opinion, good mysteries offer vivid prose, memorable characters, and intriguing plots, which together hold the reader to the last pages. By these standards, "Motherless Brooklyn" is an outstanding mystery, since it features exceptional writing by Jonathon Lethem, a weird but memorable Tourettic detective who solves the crime, and an interesting plot that carries the reader to the end of the book.
Among these genre elements, Lethem's writing is my favorite. Here's his paean to "Mad" magazine's Don Martin: "I used to pore over his drawings, trying to find what it was about his characters, drawn with riotously bulging eyes, noses, chins, Adam's apples and knees, elongated tongues and fingers and feet that flapped like banners ...that stirred such a deep chord in me. His image of life was garish and explosive, heads being stretched and shrunk, surgeons lopping off noses and dropping brains and sewing hands on backward, falling safes and metal presses squashing men flat or into boxlike packages, children swallowing coat hangers and pogo sticks and taking their shapes. His agonized characters moved through their panels with geeky physicality..." First rate work!

This is an incredible work of hardboiled fiction featuring an ambitious, but wildly successful characteristic that allows it to stand out from the crowd of private investigator mysteries. As fascinating as it is sobering, Tourette's Syndrome is spotlighted as we view the world from Tourette's suffering Lionel Essrog's perspective as he carries out an investigation into the murder of his boss and mentor while held under the spell of his illness.
Although the book features an engrossing murder investigation complete with mob-ties and conspiracy theories, it's the battle going on inside Lionel's head that holds the most interest. At times his outbursts are presented humorously, but we are always reminded how hard he's working just to appear normal.
It's a book full of stark reminders of the frailty of the human condition and how things and, in particular people, aren't always as they seem on the surface. This is a book that will stay with you long after you close the cover on the last page.

Jonathan Lethem uses the English language with such adroitness, you will not only read his books, you will live them. "Motherless Brooklyn" is a clever, comical romp with some of the quirkiest characters I've come across in a long time. (If you liked John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces", you'll enjoy this one too)
The Tourette's stricken protagonist, the endearing Lionel, is portrayed with such realism that you wonder if Mr. Lethem himself may be obsessive/compulsive to some extent. Lionel's overwhelming need to repeat sounds and touch everything within reach was not only entertaining but educational. I felt true compassion for his his affliction, and a better understanding of those who suffer from it...although I guiltily admit it was hysterical at times! But this was Lethem's objective, and he succeeded well enough to have me laughing alound at least once per chapter. I gave it only 4 stars, because it was slow reading at times..but perhaps that was because I reread some of the more eloquent descriptions of the mundane.
Thoroughly entertaining. Well written. A must read! Now, on to the next "Lethem"...

Lionel Essrog is a great narrator. Lethem could not choose better - putting the Tourette's syndrome aside (although it is significant and obviously also deliberate choice of a handicap, with the word-flow and uncontrolled baroque cursing), the story of his life is very unusual and interesting, so that -for me- the recalling of his childhood and selection of the group by Frank Minna, a local - Brooklyn - small scale mafioso and hochstapler, are probably better than the mystery plot itself.

Lionel and his friends from the orphanage are "Minna's men" - mostly employed in some background searches and bodyguarding, calling themselves detectives, but working under the cover of the limousine rental. Their real detective work starts in fact only when Minna is killed - and the plot develops somewhat imperfectly, the reader may be lost a few times and the ending is not so great - but the personality and adventures of Lionel and the possibility of entering his mind make up for it. The writing is like Lionels' mind could be - chaotic, with numerous interruptions, taking some detours...

Worth mentioning, for New Your City fans, are also descriptions and captured pictures of Brooklyn and Manhattan!

It is a good book and an encouragement to try more of Jonathan Lethem's novels.

Jonathan Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn" is an excellent innovative tale of intrigue based primarily on the daily streetlife of Brooklyn and Manhattan. The narrator and main character Lionel Essrog suffers from Tourette's syndrome complete with word spews and tics. Lethem boldly and impressively creates dialogue throughout the book littered with Tourette's based utterances

Essrog is employed by small time Brooklyn street hustler Frank Minna. Essrog along with three other orphaned teenagers Tony, Danny and Gilbert were recruited by Minna from the St. Vincent Home for Boys in downtown Brooklyn. At first under the guidance of Minna and his older brother Gerard, they were told that they were working for a moving company and they transported and moved sealed boxes to various locations. After a few months, the boys were introduced to two aged Italian wiseguys Matricardi and Rockaforte and told to forget about the encounter. Shortly thereafter the van used to move the boxes was vandalized, This lead to the fleeing from Brooklyn by both Frank and Gerard Minna

to parts unknown, leaving the boys in the lurch.

Two years pass and Minna returns with a wife, Julia. Lionel and the rest of the Minna Men, as they like to call themselves resume operations this time as a bogus detective agency and car service. They in reality are following Minna's orders as he serves as a liason for the business dealings of Matricardi and Rockaforte.

Lionel and Gilbert are assigned to drive Frank to an elegant apartment on the upper east side of Manhattan. A brass plaque on the door read Yorkville Zendo, a Japanese church teaching Zen Buddhism. Lionel was wearing a headset listening to a microphone planted on Frank. Gilbert waited in the lobby of the building. Minna enterred and was escorted into the Zendo when suddenly an apparent conflict ensued. A gargantuan giant of a man spirited Frank out of the building leading them on a wild car chase. The pursuit ended in an industrial area of Brooklyn and the microphone allowed Lionel to hone in on Minna's wherabouts. They found him thrown into a dumpster with an ultimately fatal abdominal stab wound.

Minna's murder created the crux of the plot, the investigation by Lionel Essrog of the killing of his boss and mentor. Essrog, while afflicted with the sometimes crippling effects of Tourette's nonetheless possesses a quick and analytical mind. He eventually uncovers a creatively crafted set of circumstances in which Lethem tells his captivating tale.

From the simplest perspective, this novel delivers a feeling akin to riding a roller-coaster from the '50s. What I mean by that analogy, is that although this is a roller-coaster ride of a tale, which has a likeable central character, well-drawn supporting characters, a reasonable plot-line, it suffers (like an ageing roller-coaster) from a lack of pace and umff, which means it loses momentum in parts and ultimately ends up coasting to the finish.

I would certainly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading for either style and or content, although it has to be said that the reader for style will enjoy this more that the once searching for content. The story is quite mediocre, the plot a little dull in parts and many of the characters are quite predictable. From a narrative perspective then, it doesn't really offer the reader anything new. Where this book does excel, is in the central character and how he perceived the world and conversely how the world perceives him. In that regard the thin 'murder-plot' is largely irrelevant, it is simply a vehicle through which to present this quite extraordinary rendering of a man afflicted with Tourette's and how that man navigates the world around him.

Of course having stated the above, I should now reveal to the more advanced reader, that it is not a detective story at all. There is no crime, the crime is in the mind of the central character (like the illusive 'giant') and Brooklyn is simply a metaphor for his affliction. Towards the end when he ventures out into Maine and experiences the absence of physical walls and the opportunity for new experiences, this again represents a shift from his movement away from dependence on his tics (Brooklyn) to a more tic-free existence.

As the author hints at early on in the text. Suffers of any lengthy disorder or disease come to embody themselves in that affliction. If the disease or disorder is cured or treated and they are left tic free, addiction free, illness free, then it is as if their Self, their identity too has been removed and erased. That is really the central thesis of this novel.

Jonathan Lethem clearly is a talented young writer, and his guiding concept in creating *Motherless Brooklyn* is promising, indeed. I finished the book disappointed, however, as all three of its apparent main elements simply were not presented adequately.
First of all, the book is supposed to be a different sort of "detective mystery." I cannot imagine, however, that fans of Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, or Sue Grafton would find the structure or plot of Lethem's mystery particularly gripping. No, this novel asks that readers be pulled along not on the basis of any edge-of-your-seat twists and turns in the plot, but because of its supporting literary aspects, i.e., its characters, descriptions of places, etc.
Here again, however, I felt that Lethem came up short in *Motherless Brooklyn*. His descriptions of "life growing up as orphans in 1970's Brooklyn" and then of contemporary Brooklyn generally emerge as remarkably bland and uncompelling. Overall, his characters emerge as shallow and unmemorable.
To me, both the most interesting and yet also disappointing aspect of the novel was the third main element of the book, Lethem's development of his protagonist, Lionel Essrog, whose affliction with Tourette's syndrome provides much, if not most of the book's actual content. Lethem has surely done a fine job of capturing many of the details of the behaviors that a Tourette's sufferer exhibits, including the endlessly varied and creative verbal outbursts. I comment Lethem for the research and care he evidently put into this aspect of his work. However, Lionel ultimately lacks sufficient depth as a character. He actually emerges overall as a "regular guy" who happens to suffer from uncontrollable tics. I doubt that in real life, this would be the case. To go through one's life being a "human freakshow" ALWAYS and to consequently suffer the scorn, ridicule, and uncomfortable reactions from others would, it seem to me, take a deeper toll on one's psyche than we see in Lionel Essrog. The internal monolog that Lethem attributes to Lionel is surprisingly bland, and includes remarkably little *angst*, shame, frustration, or real human depth overall. The Tourette's aspect of the book comes across ultimately as an interesting gimmick, and as such actually becomes a bit tiresome after the first hundred pages or so.
Overall, Lethem has created a highly readable work based on an original and unusual set of premises and circumstances, but his execution of his ideas proved disappointing to me.

'Motherless Brooklyn' is certainly a refreshing novel. It's about young (and likeable) juvenile deliquents who grow up under the care of a gangster (..who calls himself a private investigator). When this gangster gets murdered these kids (now young men) need to finally do some real investigation work of their own. The reader is taken on a bizarre, and funny, journey involving Zen buddhism and murder. Great stuff.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book is that the narrator, one of the juvenile deliquents, has Tourette's Syndrome. This poor fellow has the uncontrollable urge to shout out (often rude and very funny) nonsense at absolutely the wrong moments. The author actually treats him with compassion rather than ridicule; I don't think sufferers of this condition will feel exploited.
Bottom line: a thoroughly engaging read. Good story, great characterizations.

There is no doubt in my mind that Jonathan Lethem is a gifted writer. His prose is crisp, a little crazy, and often a lot of fun to read. I was intrigued by his idea of a detective with Tourette's syndrom, which makes him compulsive (actually, a fairly useful trait for a detective) and also given to quirky flights of language. The reviews of the book led me to expect something with the page-turning qualities of a good murder mystery combined with an unusual, and more poetic, use of language than you generally find in genre fiction.
The book seemed to live up to that description for the first fifty pages or so, but I seriously question whether many reviewers read the entire novel, because by the middle the plot bogs down, it becomes clear that the characters are never going to develop into anything more complicated than you'd find in a B movie, and the language, at first intriguing, becomes just plain eccentric.
Lethem has talent, but he wasted it on this novel.

Courtesy 1980s LA Law, that glossy, technicolor descendent of Miami Vice and Dynasty, full of soap opera and courtroom intrigue, a response, perhaps, to the gritty reality of another show, another 80s icon, Hill Street Blues.

I don't remember the character, although I think he may have been a lawyer. I just remember him screaming, loudly, randomly, and bewilderingly.

I was just a teenager, an adolescent who hadn't yet seen enough of life to understand the infinite diversities within it. I was self-centered and assured as an insecure teenager could possibly be. So I saw that lawyer character on LA Law, that character with Tourette's syndrome, and decided he was one of the most annoying TV characters I'd ever come across.

I despised him. It may have been because I'm a naturally tense, jumpy individual. The percussive expletives, the random, disturbing tics those afflicted with the syndrome often exhibit, just a little too grating on my naturally raw nerves. Freaks. That's what I thought. Maybe still do.

Jonathan Lethem's narrator does, too. Even though he also happens to be one of them.

So here I am, a fan of Lethem, having read and loved with all my heart his "The Fortress of Solitude", that when I saw this earlier novel, "Motherless Brooklyn", well I had to pick it up.

Only to find the first person narrator madly afflicted with Tourette's. But this was Lethem, and "Fortress" was my favorite book of 2010.

Through and through a noirish detective novel (I've read far darker), with a narrator who you certainly *can't* just say only *happens* to be afflicted with Tourette's (since it's the central conflict of many conflicts within the novel, wheels within wheels, you might say), I fully expected to be a profoundly put off reader. I never expected to finish the book, let alone like it.

But darn it, not only did I come to care for the narrator profoundly, but I managed to make peace with his distractions: expletives (almost never word-wise obscene) and gestures and shoulder tapping and collar straightening and finger tapping and neck craning and obsessive counting (and I could go on and on). Yep, I got used to them. Read past them, really, set out as they were in italics. And I think that's how Lethem wanted me to react.

By the end of the novel, Lionel was another guy with Tourette's, a reluctant hero type, trying to solve mysteries within mysteries.

All in all, Lethem crafts a crackling good story filled with interesting, engaging characters. I never grew bored. The story has its share of twists. And it's so obvious, after a couple books now, just how justifiably in love Lethem is with NYC. It shows through his writing. His writing makes its mark.

How he could make a truly sympathetic character, when symptoms of Tourette's interrupt the narrative on just about every single page is, simply, quite a trick. Lethem has so much talent.

"Motherless Brooklyn" is strongly recommended.

My friend Matt gave me this book this summer, and after I read it I realised that this was the second book I've read by Jonathan Lethem, who also wrote the incredibly strange This Shape We're In. This story is about a young man, part of a team of four "detectives", all orphans, who do work for the Brooklyn hustler who took them out of the orphanage. The narrator, Lionel Essrog, also suffers from Tourette's Syndrome, the condition of tics and verbal outbursts, which people in his vicinity either understand or don't. When his boss is murdered, he goes on the case to try to find the murderer; the murderer is obvious, so the story is more about finding out why he was murdered. But even more, the story is about Lionel, and understanding how he lives, how he controls his tics, and what kind of a future he has waiting for him. Orphans with Tourettes probably have a hard lot in life, and since Lionel is probably also the world's worst detective he doesn't have much going for him there either. He doesn't really do anything, he stumbles onto the story somewhat haphazardly, and hardly gets any information out of anybody.

The book wasn't supremely satisfying, but nonetheless well-written. And although the story is a bit of a non-story, the way it is told and the way the story unfolds is good writing. It's certainly more straight forward than This Shape We're In.

"Motherless Brooklyn" starts off with a bang, as the narrator Lionel Essrog desperately tries to trail his boss, Frank Minna, a small-time Brooklyn hood, when he is strong-armed into a car and driven across the city. The action is relentless, but then Lethem turns around and develops Essrog's back story: a man with Tourette's, prone to inappropriate barks and touching, a sensitive, stranded orphan who is "adopted" by Minna for some low-cost labor. The orphans become the "Minna Men," and the tic-ridden Essrog strangely becomes the man who must find his boss' killer.

Maybe "Motherless Brooklyn" isn't as plot-oriented as the stalwarts of the genre, but I love how Lethem paints Brooklyn through Essrog's eyes, accurately rendering his symptoms and syndrome without undue interference in the story itself. Lethem is juggling a lot of elements here, from the open questions of the plot to Essrog and the other characters, and pulls it all off with panache.

This is the best book by Lethem I've come across, and I highly recommend it for those new to his work.

This book is hard to categorize. Is it a detective novel? A satire of the detective novel? A literary journey through the complexities of language? Who knows, and the book is so thoroughly entertaining that it really doesn't matter what the authors real motives are.
The narrator, Lionel Essrog (a name just dying for a Tourettic tic) has Tourette's Syndrome, which makes him a wonderful and unique storyteller. And the reader can't help but laugh out loud at his unexpected yellings and shoulder taps. I kept expecting Lionel to become annoying or to find a cure for his tics, but Lethem gratefully keeps him true to character the entire book. The word associations and spoonerisms that Lionel erupts with will be interesting to anyone who likes wordplay.
The detective part of this novel comes in when Minna, a low status criminal, is knifed. It's up to his gang, the Minna Men, of which Lionel is one, to figure out whodunnit. What occurs is a tongue-in-cheek crime story that actually manages to be a pretty good mystery in the end.
This is overall a pretty strange book in that it was never what I expected it to be. Hilarious, mysterious, tragic, and touching. How did Lethem manage to do all this in just over 300 pages? I'll be reading another Lethem very soon....

Why is Motherless Brooklyn hailed as such a great book? I suppose it is because the story is told so effortlessly - Letham is a natural storyteller - and the narrator of the story is a true original. It is a fun read - I defie anyone to not be entertained by this book and see it through to the end. But when examined on it's own, this is not the piece of modern literature it is held up to be. It's only when held in the context of Letham's other works that you can make those judgements. I don't believe this is any way to judge a book and so for me, it falls far short of being a serious work. I know there are people that will say that I'm 'not getting it' but personally I don't think there's much here to get. In the end the story reads like the storyline of a weekly TV comedy/drama - if ever there was a book begging a TV series adaptation it's this one. Sure it's fun, but so is Buffy The Vampire Slayer and to be honest this story is a little closer to Murder She Wrote. Wait for the paperback and take it on holiday.

I loved reading every word of Jonathan Letham's Motherless Brooklyn. First, I must confess that I'm biased because a good portion of the story takes place in my neighborhood, however, with that said, Brooklyn is merely the backdrop for this mystery that unfolds, twists and turns with every page.
The story is seen through the eyes of Lionel Essrog, an orphan with tourettes, who works for a low level Brooklyn Mobster. Lionel, gets caught up in the murder of his boss and takes it upon himself to solve the crime...which is the work of some old time Brooklyn mobsters.
Throughout the novel, Letham is brilliant at creating a world where the reader understands Lionel's tourettes and is able to quickly understand his actions yet sympathize as a victim. Letham also does a teriffic job of developing all of the supportint characters as well. All of which, are uniquely pathetic.
This novel, is one of the liveliest reads I've had in some time and is strongly recommended if you're looking for a great whodunnit, that is also a great study in character.

Though not as philosophical and brooding as "Amnesia Moon", nor as rapid and cranky as "Gun With Occasional Music", "Motherless Brooklyn" manages to come out on top or very close to the top of Lethem's impressive heap. In portraying a would-be detective with Tourettes syndrome, Lethem has created a whole new rhythm and syncopation to his prose, a truly brilliant way to write a novel that comes from the viewpoint of man who cannot be still. The characters are unavoidably beautiful mirrors, fascinating character studies in a wonderful world of nostalgia and crime. But for one 7-page lull that dropped the otherwise breakneck pace of the prose, it was truly a book that I COULD NOT put down; rarely do I read books in one sitting. What can I say that has not been said before? Lethem is THE American original.

Lethem did an excellent job with defining his characters and justifies the reason why the main character, Lionel Essrog, would risk his neck to find out who killed his friend, Frank Minna. Motherless Brooklyn was humorous and I found myself charmed by Essrog! The book was rich with information without weighing me down with too many unnecessary details (I've read stories that took an entire page to describe a run down building). The story read smoothly even when the narrator starts one of his "tics", I couldn't bring myself to skip any pages. The only faults with this book is that it starts off with a bang...continues giving off heat...and then lets me down with a wimper of an ending. From page 263, I grew bored with the so called climax as it lingered for quite a few pages and I wished that the situation didn't resolve in such a dull way. Nevertheless, 85% of the book was just too much fun to allow the last 48 pages to spoil it. I simply loved it!

Lethem writes a fascinating character study of a man, Essrog, with Tourette's syndrome. Growing up in a gritty yet somehow surrealistic Brooklyn, he struggles to survive in an orphanage. With the onset of adolescence Essrog's tics become more pronounced and run the full gamut of potential symptoms, all of which are resistant to medication. These oddities of brain chemistry which cause uncontrollable movements, sounds and compulsive behavior interfere with his relationships but cause him to take a different perspective on life. His one solace is the library where he spends years reading in isolation.

Despite the disabling effects of the tics, Essrog manages to get work as a small-time hood and escape the orphanage. He works for Frank Minna, the first person to understand Essrog's symptoms and name them. Essrog becomes a "Minna Man" along with several other boys from the orphanage. They live with strict rules of behavior and a structured life-style and worship their charismatic boss. When their boss is killed Essrog is compelled to investigate the murder.

Motherless Brooklyn is more than anything a fascinating look into a difficult world of a man haunted by his tics. The details of his life and thinking are relentlessly yet charmingly portrayed. While reading this I was so much inside Essrog's psyche that I felt like I had Tourette's too. Lethem has a talented and idiosyncratic way with language, a facility with words that is a joy to read.

You might think a writer could not construct a brilliantly-worded, completely engaging detective story centering around a protagonist with Tourette syndrome. You'd be wrong. Lethem is a brilliant author who writes books you just can't set down once you have been lucky (or informed) enough to pick one up. Lethem writes about Brooklyn as Dennis Lehane (e.g. Gone, Baby, Gone (Harper Fiction)) writes about Boston---with the authority of experience. In regard to what Lethem says he loves most of books are "the mysterious movements of characters and situations and the emotions that accompany those movements." THAT is why you read Lethem. Because his writing is true to his passion and it makes his books incredibly entertaining and intriguing.

Motherless Brooklyn is Johnathan Lethem's homage to/parody of the hard-boiled detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, with a twist: the novel's protagonist, Lionel Essrog (what a great name!), has Tourette's syndrome. Lionel's Tourette's causes him to, among other things, bark like a dog, compulsively pat other people on the shoulder, and spout out nonsensical phrases, an example of which gives this review its title (another favorite of mine is "Lancelot ancillary oscillope!").
I'm not sure what to say about Motherless Brooklyn, except I can't remember the last time I had this much fun reading a novel. Someone apparently forgot to tell Mr. Lethem that "serious fiction" isn't supposed to be entertaining and funny. Here's hoping no one ever does.

I am extremely lucky to have received an advanced copy of "Motherless Brooklyn". It has thus far been the best book I have read this summer. Lethem combines the two virtues of being the most readable and most imaginative American writer of his generation. His latest reads like his debut "Gun w/ Occasional Music" stripped of the surreal elements (ie. no talking kangaroos or 'babyheads') but still retaining the awesome prose and mindbending twists. Lethem really puts you in to the mind of a thirty-something wiseguy suffering from Torrette's who happens to be a lot smarter than anyone realizes. If you have ever wondered how a Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett novel would read if Haruki Murakami did the editing, then you really need this book.

Jonathan Lethem did a masterful job writing this book. The reader is really able to enter the mind of the main character, who has Tourette's, and identify with him.

While a good read, its not perfect. I never felt compelled by the mystery of "who dunnit" in the book. It felt more like a brief character study of Lionel, which was a good thing, but never felt the suspense the author tried to create about who murdered his friend.

The verdict: definitely worth reading, recommended. I have bought three other books by the same author since I read this one, and there is no higher vote of confidence than that.

Seems to suffer from one of the problems that plagues a lot of books the environment created is fantastic but the plot doesn't get going until about ½ way through the narrative if you can hang on for awhile you should be ok. Its not the plot that got me which if I could honest wasn't particularly interesting another guy murdered wow never read that before.

Rather for me it was the quite honest portrayal of a man with a horribly frustrating illness. The author does a wonderful job of communicating just how much it controls your life and how it can be overcome with the right support. That was enough for me because at times the plot moves so slow you want to throw the book down in frustration.

Jonathan Lethem has more than a way with words, as many reviews state, because he has a way with plot, character, and theme as well. Lionel Essrog, his main character, has Tourette's Syndrome, but it's not a gimmick ... it's an integral characteristic of an interesting man.
As Lionel attempts to unravel the central mystery, it becomes clear that he is more than he appears, both to the readers and the people around him. I came to like him very much, and better, I came to understand him. There is no higher praise to an author than that he opened a new world to his readers, and Motherless Brooklyn is one of those rare books that does just that.
Lethem has gotten rave reviews for his new novel, Fortress of Solitude, but you should start here. Now that he's getting recognition, Lethem will be a literary force for the near future.

I normally don't read detective novels, but this wasn't a typical who-done-it. The murder mystery was a mere backdrop for a compelling portrait of a man living with Tourette's Syndrome. I personally live with two people who have obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it was helpful to be reminded how ever-present these types of conditions are, and how hard one must work just to stand still. I enjoyed a positive portrayal of a man who found a place in the world where he can function and even thrive, despite the epithet of "freakshow." The only part that seemed unrealistic is the lack of embarrassment Lionel Essrog seemed to experience. Even the most stoic of individuals with Tourette's go through moments of exteme embarrassment and feelings of shame, and frustration at their lack of control over their ticcing behaviors.