Motherless Brooklyn

The only 'hard-boiled detective' fiction I will ever read, because it's a parody and homage to the genre. 🥚 The bare-bones plot, a construction of cheeky noir cliches, quickly falls away to the forceful and intense circuitry of the narrator's thoughts. This book to me wasn't about a murder mystery, but about the emotions that hound all those who participate in one.

The prose is hypnotic, not just in sound but in the smooth visceral way it made Tourette's click for me. I'm still not as educated as I'd like to be on Tourette's, so it's not my place to say how authentic this book is about the experience, but to my primitive understanding the metaphors felt incredibly human. Palpable. And personal. A very vivid inhabiting of mind.

Another beautiful dimension to the story exists in the relationship between Lionel and his father figure Minna, who doesn't actively move the plot but looms over Lionel's narrative like a slowly setting sun.

I don't remember many details now but this is a 90s book so ⚠Warnings for slurs. Narrator's thoughts about women & mental illness are probably typical to the hardboiled genre. Whether or not the beautiful writing redeems it is the reader's choice, but worth a read if you want to see Tourette's being organically woven into the narrator's approach to grief, loss and reality.

Frank Minna is a neighbourhood owner of a seedy detective agency, or he was until he was found stabbed to death. Lionel, along with Tony, Danny and Gilbert worked for Frank and were often collectively known as Minna Men. The group grow up together in St. Vincent’s Home for Boys and owe a lot to this small time mobster turned private eye. Lionel is determined to find out what happened by Frank.

This is my first Jonathan Lethem novel and I have been keen to read him for a long time. What I heard about Lethem is his ability to combine genre fiction and explore themes in an interesting way. Motherless Brooklyn does just this; under the vial of a hard-boiled detective novel, this also is a coming of age story as well as exploring life with Tourette’s syndrome. Lionel Essrog has lived with Tourette’s for his entire life, manifesting in physical and vocal tics. He is often referred to as Brooklyn’s human freakshow, which only begins to cover the reactions people to have Lionel’s disorder.

I have to admit I knew very little about Tourette’s syndrome going into this novel, I knew the effects but I did not fully grasp what was going through mind of someone living with the disorder. One of the things I love most about reading fiction is learning about the lives of people living in different cultures or living a different life than my own. Motherless Brooklyn allowed me to explore life living with Tourette, it was an eye opening novel.

On the surface Motherless Brooklyn is a pretty simple hard-boiled detective novel, but exploring growing up as an orphan in an all-boys home with Tourette’s makes this novel great. Jonathan Lethem is a brilliant writer; he takes a typical genre plot and explores just how complex the story can be. I believe The Fortress of Solitude does this with comic books (similar to The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), Gun, With Occasional Music with science fiction and Chronic City with drug culture. I have not read these books, so I might be wrong; either way I am keen to check them out.

I am so glad to have finally picked up a Jonathan Lethem book and Motherless Brooklyn was the perfect starting point. I wanted to stay in this world for as long as possible, and I ended up slowing down on my reading. I have since discovered to joys of reading slowly with The Valley of the Dolls, but Motherless Brooklyn may have been my starting point. I have no idea which Lethem book to read next, I might have to try to get to all of them. Motherless Brooklyn was a great book and I loved that it was set in a hard-boiled setting. The combination between the genre style and understanding Tourette’s worked really well for this novel; highly recommend Motherless Brooklyn to everyone.

This review originally appeared on my blog; www.knowledgelost.org/book-reviews/genre/mystery/motherless-brooklyn-by-jonathan-lethem/