Imagine a personality with Tourette's combined with compulsive touching and counting, surrounded in an environment of Brooklyn speak and Mafia threats. This combination makes for some hilarious conversational interchanges in this book. Is it a murder mystery? A noir thriller? A stylistic tour de force? Yes! Jonathan Lethem has created an unforgettable character in loyal, sweet-natured, Tourette’s-afflicted Lionel Essrog. This sometimes hilarious and always absurd story takes us in and around Brooklyn and into the unfamiliar point of view of a man with Tourette’s syndrome. The result is a little like The Sopranos: surprisingly lyrical, complexly masculine, and toughly tender.

Lethem received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2000 Gold Dagger award for crime fiction for Motherless Brooklyn. In 2005 it was announced that Edward Norton would direct, adapt, and star in a film adaptation, set in the 1950s. Motherless Brooklyn was made into a movie released in 2019.

The entertainment value of this book is not in the plain vanilla mystery plot, but rather in the skillful descriptive writing. The most intriguing focus of the book for me was the exploration of the inner workings of the Tourette's mind. The first person description of the Tourette's experience is so vivid I can't help but believe it has some validity. Below are some example quotations from the book:

"Tourette's is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain---same thing) appoints me it, again and again. So I tag back. Can it do otherwise? If you've ever been it you know the answer."

"Me, I became a walking joke, preposterous, improbable, unseeable. My outbursts, utterances and tappings were white noise or static, irritating but tolerated, and finally boring unless they happened to provoke a response from some unsavvy adult, a new or substitute teacher."

"... all I do is compress and release, over and over, never saving or satisfying anyone, least myself. Yet the tape plays on ..."

Here's a quote from Lionel, the book's protagionist, explaining why he doesn't look (or act) like a detective:

" "Maybe you're thinking of detectives in movies or on television." I was a fine one to be explaining this distinction. "On TV they're all the same. Real detectives are as unalike as fingerprints, or snowflakes." "

This is an example of a book that I believe is more entertaining listened to as an audio book rather than read. In the audio format the Tourette's ticks are jerky outbursts much closer to the real thing than anything that my mind is able to conger up. At least for me, when I read the written words that are part of the Tourette's ticks they're just nonsense words to be skimmed over. Also, the Brooklyn accents come through in the audio format in a way that my mind can't duplicate.

Motherless Brooklyn is a vivid and spot-on portrait of a segment of New York City in the 1990s and, via flashbacks, in the 1970s and 1980s. Motherless Brooklyn is also a fascinating insight into Tourette Syndrome, which with the protagonist is afflicted. Last (and most certainly least), Motherless Brooklyn is one of the worst mystery novels I have ever come across. The plot--which involves solving a murder--seems virtually extraneous. Rather, the author's chief aims are clearly to revive an image of the NYC of his youth and to explore a character with Tourette's. In these goals, he succeeds admirably. However, his attempt to weave these elements with a meaningful storyline is a disappointment.

Well, shoot.  Despite the many 4 and 5 star reviews from my GR buddies, I failed to get a grip with this one.  At first the ticcing, touching, tapping, mirroring, and counting by Lionel Essrog (aka Freakshow) was entertaining and funny.  But soon, it became tiresome and repetitive to me.  And then I felt bad, because I could make it stop it by putting the book aside, a resolution that was not available to  Lionel.  There is some clever writing in here, and a scene set in a Japanese restaurant that is hilarious.  But all in all, it was just a poor fit for me.

Lionel Essrog is one of the most endearing, sympathetic, and intriguing characters I've come across in a novel. Lionel is presumed by many to be less than bright simply because he has Tourette's syndrome, but oh, there is so much going on in Lionel's head. Despite his difficulties in socializing and conversing, Lionel becomes an unlikely detective in this mystery plot.

Motherless Brooklyn is more than a mystery novel, though. It's also the story of how a man unravels the truth about what has been going on in the backdrop of his life, how he was manipulated into his place, back when he was an orphaned child.

I admire the way that Jonathan Lethem can create such a different, authentic sounding narrator. Not only that, he created some very funny moments in this dark story.

And now--I'm simply going to have to touch all of Lethem's novels...I'd recommend this one to anyone.

P.S. I found it intriguing that Lionel is into Prince.

A modern noir with the hook that its narrator has Tourette's, Motherles Brooklyn is terrifically entertaining all the way through. It feels smaller than my other Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude, which keeps it from a five-star rating for me, but it's an awfully good time.

Tourette's is on every page, and while it all feels like Lethem did a lot of research and is fairly depicting it, it also feels overwhelming - so much so that at one point one gets the sense that Lethem has stepped into the narrative to excuse himself: talking about Tourette's, Lionel explains, is itself a Touretteish tic.

I'm a little surprised this hasn't been made into a movie yet. One would think actors would be pushing each other aside to play Lionel. I'm not saying I'd be totally psyched to see it - it seems like an invitation to scenery-chewing - just saying it seems likely.

And indeed IMDb tells me that it's somewhere in development hell, with Ed Norton possibly attached. Of course, Ed Norton. (Update: oh hey, it got made, Norton directed it, Bruce Willis (!) plays Lionel. Out in 2019.)

This first person tough-guy 'detective' narrative features Lionel Essrog, a Tourette's sufferer who was pulled--along with three other boys--from a Brooklyn orphanage by a small-time hood, Frank Minna, who annoints them his 'Minna Men.' It gives the boys status and purpose, as it does their leader, helping him to move merch of questionable source, which the boys nevertheless never question-- though they and we are introduced to two shadowy, elderly brothers whose menace they feel but whose link to Minna is never clear. The first half is steeped in the linguistic torments and OCD behavior of Essrog as he relates the backstory of the Minna Men and the present story of Frank's untimely death and Essrog's determination to find his killer. I found myself unable to go to bed, go to work, do anything as the story jigged and jagged with the verbal fireworks of recreating the Tourettish tics. It was only when the back story caught up to the front story and the book by necessity became a regular detective story that the author seemed to lose interest and rush to tie up his tale. I'd take a half a point off for this but there are no half points on Goodreads, and it was well worth the time it took to devour this compelling, fast-moving novel. Lethem is a great writer, and his Brooklyn breathes. It breathes food, and old cars, and guys who are still combing their hair into pompadours in the 1980s. Tourettes becomes a percusive poetry in his hands, and the boys and their leader model themselves after the gangster movies and gumshoe novels they've read.

"A minute later the 67 bus rolled like a great battered appliance down Bergen, empty but for the driver. Public transportation was the night's pulse, the beep on the monitor at the patient's bedside. In a few hours those same trains and busses would be jammed with jawing, caffeinated faces, littered with newspapers and fresh gum. Now they kept the faith."

Aesthetic Pastiches (As Opposed to Modernist Pastiches)

Albert Mobilio's review in the New York Times online (October 17, 1999) is too generous. Mobilio notes that the book, like Lethem's earlier novels, was a mash-up of genres, in this case mixing hard-boiled detective fiction with a narrator with Tourette's, so produce an effect Mobilio thinks of as Keatonesque. Mobilio concludes:

"In 'Motherless Brooklyn,' solving the crime is beside the point. If you're a mystery maven, this might bother you. Instead, this is a novel about the mysteries of consciousness, the dualism Essrog alludes to when he talks about his 'Tourette's brain' as if it were an entity apart from him. In a brief poetic interlude, he muses, 'In Tourette dreams you shed your tics . . . or your tics shed you . . . and you go with them, astonished to leave yourself behind.' Under the guise of a detective novel, Lethem has written a more piercing tale of investigation, one revealing how the mind drives on its own 'wheels within wheels.'"

The book would be good if this had been true, but it isn't: like many writers and visual artists, Lethem was combining genres because he liked each of them separately, and the play of cognition and language that results provides only brief surprises and jokes, and not a fundamental rethinking of one genre by another or an undermining of one discourse's reality by the other. The same happens in music, with contemporaneous composers like Alfred Schnittke or George Rochberg. These are incomplete works, dissonant with themselves but without a sense that the author, or composer, has imagined that the interaction might produce a deeper unity, or an irreparable dissonance, or that juxtapositions themselves might itself be the results of a distracted consciousness. (For a good analysis of Schmittke along these lines, see Richard Taruskin's volume in the Oxford History of Western Music series.)

In the 1980s combining genres in music (and in architecture) was a common artistic strategy, which produced ephemeral effects of surprise and gratified audiences who took pleasure in their capacity to enjoy and understand what was happening. In music especially, combinations of genres involved neo-conservative harmonies and avoided undermining sense and coherence.

A good example of a more profound rethinking of the meeting of genres is Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy. By comparison Lethem's juxtapositions are a kind of aestheticism: for him there's a pleasure in layering genres, because it produces a entertaining veneer of virtuosity and a frisson of unexpected, "illicit" combinations.

(I originally wrote this around 2012; Lethem's work continues to be full of metafictions, "intricate, ironic" pastiches, pseudonyms, and collaged genres. Now he's on record explaining how he thinks it's incumbent on contemporary writers to use all the resources of our polyphonic age. Theo Tait's review of Lethem's The Blot in the London Review of Books, March 16, 2017, is an exemplary analysis of the shortcomings of this approach. Lethem is a minor novelist: it's not just that he misjudges the corrosive potential of pastiches, but also, more simply, that he has not found a voice outside the shifting embodiment of what he takes to be contemporary polyphony.)

There are more laugh out loud moments in this novel than in anything I’ve read for ages. Lionel, the orphaned aspiring detective with Tourettes is an adorable character. (Lethem helps us understand that we all have Tourettes to some extent: "Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.”) The prose is consistently dazzling – often making you see the familiar with a fresh enlightening dew on it – and the plot is gripping from the word go. What’s not to like?

This book contains quite possibly the best opening chapter I have ever read. It introduces you to the voice of the main character, a Tourette's Syndrome sufferer, so from the off we are shown dazzling linguistic play as he tics and forms thrilling, improbable phrases. But in addition it paints convincing voices for other characters, depicts a milieu and drags you headlong through it at breakneck pace. Quite simply it does everything an opening should do; introduce, make out, go all the way and then light a cigarette and bask in the glow. And it doesn't employ any rubber prophylactic. Dangerous, breathless stuff.

Of course Chapter 2 eases up on the frenticism and the linguistic pyrotechnics in favour of extended flashbackstory, which is a pity, but Lethem has banked a lot of credits with me so I'll forgive him. The noirish plot too is a bit mundane, though stylistically it pays homage in all the rights ways. (a body of water in Brooklyn being described as "made up of 90% guns"). The last 2 chapters tying up loose plot ends is really low key and could even be disposed of altogether were it not for a presumption of closure required by the reader.

The mentor of "Motherless Brooklyn", the man who takes four orphans and gives them odd jobs to do within his streetwise, bit of this-bit of that commercial empire, has a hip, caustic street language. His bosses are a couple of Soprano-like Wise Guys who talk with stilted English as second language menace, mangling grammar in order to establish status through what lies behind and unsaid. While instantly recognisable to the reader's ear, Lethem is skilled enough to offer them as mere alternative idioms to that of the Tourettic explosions of language. They are glibber, but no less exotic than the eructions from Lionel the Tourette's sufferer's mouth. We each have our own schtick. Again Lethem dissects each dialogue he offers, to show who has the greater status at any one point and who has lost it in the verbal negotiation. Lionel the MC never has any status, because people think he's an idiot, a "freakshow", which endows him with unseen power since he interacts with the world on more levels than most: he feels its bumps, warts and all, like a phrenologist.

When Lionel leaves NYC for the first time in his life in an extended chase into Maine, he realises he is unfamiliar with the wider world beyond. And his ticcing and language react accordingly, trying to wedge new words and phrases into his brain with which to cope with a strange new landscape. This is a brilliant evocation of how language works to organise our sensory impressions for us. Through the device of someone who struggles to organise it, because his language is untamable.

For anyone who loves language

"Context is everything" it says on the opening page.

JL's Motherless Brooklyn is " a place made out of leftover chunks of disappointment, unemployment,and regret." p23

The hero and narrator, in addition to his orphan status and generally precarious lifestyle, has a fearful mental condition which dramatically influences his interactions with the world.Growing up in the library of the St Vincent Home for Boys "in the part of downtown Brooklyn no developer wishes to claim," he "set out to read every book in the library..." and incidently to avoid his fellow studentsp37 but he "couldn't find the language of myself" p47

This could be a bleak tale of abandonment and trauma. Instead, it is a warm and wickedly funny story of coming into one's own.

I adored this book and felt bereft to finish it. I didn't think I was capable of laughing like I did throughout the reading. In fact, at the beach with it, I laughed so hard I fell off my blanket. Then I wondered if the people nearby would think it half so funny, or if it was something more peculiar and quite perfect for my rather jaded sense of humor.

But, as our hero concluded early on in his life, "Who has to make sense of everything?"

“In detective stories things are always always, the detective casting his exhausted, caustic gaze over the corrupted permanence of everything and thrilling you with his sweetly savage generalizations. This or that runs deep or true to form, is invariable, exemplary. Oh sure. Seen it before, will see it again. Trust me on this one.

Assertions and generalizations are, of course, a version of Tourette’s. A way of touching the world, handling it, covering it with confirming language.”

This was a very tightly crafted mystery, with a lot of soul, and a wonderful resolution. A love letter to the classic detective novel, but also a love letter to loneliness. I’ve heard some people say that it felt too gimmicky, and to them I’d say “You’re missing the point. The parts you thought were gimmicky were just the reality that the character inhabited. It’s your fault you thought it was meant to be funny, and you might also be kind of an asshole.”

After reading this, in my non-expert self diagnosis, I think I may have some very subtle, extremely manageable Tourette’s going on.

When I was a kid, I ticced like you wouldn’t believe. I’d clamp my eyes shut in the middle of conversations and stop talking. I’d grind my jaw left and right until it ached. I’d grind my left shoulder blade on my ribs over and over again. I only ever did one of these things at a time, and I had no control over them. I’d grunt repeatedly. I’d clench various muscles. Each new tic would overwrite the previous one. It was pretty debilitating back then. These days, all I do is clench my right arm really hard when I’m stressed, and roll my shoulders a little bit. Much better. Totally manageable.

But yeah, the book is good, you should check it out.

I read this 'often hilarious'-[one-of-a-kind]-novel many years ago --

The main character has Tourette's syndrome. I must have read this about 10 years ago. I've yet to read another novel (crime-satire-whodunit-to boot), with a story centered around 'Tourette's syndrome.
No other author wanted to go toe-to-toe with, Jonathan Lethem, huh?

"Eat S*it"... "go F#*+K yourself" ...."Thehorrorthehorror" .....
and "Icouldabeenacontender!" is endearing in the most pure *Zen-in-the city*!

Wonderful reviews here on GR's that came before me!!!