Seriously, if you haven't yet read anything by Lethem, do it!  This book is about a detective with Tourette's, and the writing is hysterical.  It would be a normal mystery except for the internal (and external) dialogue of the character, putting in ridiculous words like EATMEBAILEY in the middle of sentences.

Time for another dismissive review based on only a partial reading:

Overall impression: This is inept gibberish of the sort that sometimes bamboozles critics and award committees into thinking it is ept. However, it has the kind of innocent stupid charm possessed by such television shows as Monk--a program which falls in the same disfunctional-investigator category, which is a surprisingly burgeoning genre--and this has the charm to draw the reader into wanting to know what will develop next--regardless of how it is presented or whether it makes a bit of sense. Thus I was enabled to read the entire first chapter, and the majority of the second chapter. Maybe someday, somehow, I will carry on.

The principal character has such a case of Tourettes/OCD that he is absolutely defined by his disability, and he thinks and speaks of virtually nothing else. Sure, he happens to have a name, and even a history, but let's not forget, at any time, just exactly what is wrong with this guy.

The author's writing is... awkward. The protagonist and the author both have an excessive need to explain everything at all times. I quickly started to wonder as I went, When will there be a line of dialog, or an action, that the author does not need to editorialize about and explain?

"Can't be doing that shit," he said. "Gotta take it elsewhere." He grinned at his own verbal flourish, openly pleased to provide this contrast to my lack of control.

Admittedly, I didn't quite understand what the author was getting at here. Is it a particularly impressive "verbal flourish" to use the word "elsewhere" rather than "somewhere else"? Is that what's remarkable here? But, more importantly, was the dialog in any way improved by the elaboration that the speaker grinned at his own verbal flourish, and the reason for his pleasure was having enjoyed an opportunity to provide a contrast to the lack of control of a Tourette's sufferer (in case we've forgotten since the last sentence what the narrator's issue is). I mean, if the point of the line of dialog were apparent in itself, I wouldn't need the author's elaboration, while if it is not sufficiently apparent, the author's hand-holding only becomes an irritant.

The author has odd diction... such that I would tend to label it... wrong. Much of the time.

"Our bunch splayed and caught up with the rear end of their splaying bunch and the two blended, like video spaceships on some antic screen."

and

"Tony, Danny and Gilbert all stared at me, uncertain how I'd gained this freshet of approval."

He hasn't recently been flooded with approval. Perhaps there has been a minor thaw in the attitude of the man who "praised" him? Perhaps this is ironic, as there has been little thaw and hardly a hint of a flood--or praise, for that matter. But mainly the word choice seems strained, and it's another example where the author just didn't want to let a line of dialog go without a bit of self-consciously clever and extraneous commentary (not particularly in keeping with the character of the narrator, by the way).

And he describes things clumsily and... falsely... such that I often think he has no idea what he is doing.

"The brownstone which appeared so ordinary was an anomaly just through the doors. The insides--typical narrow halls and stairs, spoked banisters, high ornate ceilings--had all been stripped and gutted, replaced with a warehouse-style stairwell into the basement apartment and upstairs. The parlor floor where we stood was sealed off on the left by a clean white wall and single closed door. We ferried the equipment into the upper-floor apartment while Minna stood guarding the rear of the van. The drums went easily.
The band's equipment tucked neatly into one corner of the apartment, on wooden pallets apparently set out for that purpose..."

Okay, listen. One could just tell us the main action without bothering with detailed description. Or one could opt for detailed description because one is that kind of author who just revels in detailed description for the hell of it, or because one believes that the narrator is that kind of thinker, you know, he's like all detail-oriented and stuff... But is it ideal to give description which doesn't actually create any image or impression other than that the author is trying to be a word-juggler? I mean... no one has seen the supposed "typical" interior that has supposedly been stripped away if it ever was there to begin with. What is a "warehouse-style stairwell"? The warehouses I know are more typified by freight elevators, high-ceilings, and lifts, but if the point is merely that the stair wells are wide, wouldn't "wide" be a sufficient description? And how are the floors arranged relative to one another, in any way differently from any other three- or four-story building? How is a parlor floor that is "sealed off" by a white wall any different from... a hallway? And where is this relative to the stairs? Why is "ferrying" equipment any better than carrying it? Why would pallets be set out for equipment to be placed on, once the equipment has been carried upstairs, when the function of pallets is not as a platform for putting things on, but as a means of moving things? But as for the context for all this--such as why the hell are these people shuttling around equipment here and there--a little critical thought should reveal that he answer is not "it's a mystery," but rather, "it makes no sense what the hell these guys are doing."

Am I nitpicking? One might think so if this were an impression raised by one short passage. However, it seems almost every sentence and paragraph has features of senselessness, authorial uncertainty, and awkward efforts to craft sentences, which nonetheless fail to communicate anything but a muddled physical space that can't be pictured, and which betray any underlying logic or perhaps distract us from logic's absence.

"The front room's old architecture was intact..." When the author says this, in a context in which neither the narrator nor reader should have access to any knowledge about the old architecture of anything... and it appears that by "architecture," the author means "interior decorating," and perhaps by "old" he means "fitting a stereotype of what an Italian Brooklyn home is supposed to look like"... well, it just leaves me going "Huh, what?"

"Under our feet was an ancient carpet, layered with color, a dream map of the past."

That's another way of saying "We stepped on a rug." Though I'm not sure why one would want to point this out. Though, again, I don't really know what it means for it to be "layered with color," nor in what way it is "a dream map of the past." Unless that just means its old. In which case, the sentence could be revised to "We stepped on an old rug."

Well, okay, I'm grumpy. The fact that I kind of wanted to read on a little more anyway, means the book perhaps merits an evaluation of "O.K."

Oh, I know I'm supposed to like Jonathan Lethem, but the fact is I've never been able to finish a single book of his, including this one.

David "Phil" Giltinan

This was my first Jonathan Lethem novel and I have to admit it was pretty damn good, a little weird, but still good. The main protagonist, Lionel, has severe Tourette Syndrome that causes him to shout out random nonsensical words and touch things and people as well as several other strange tics. Lionel works for a man named Minna who owns a very small but shady business that fronts as a car delivery service that is actually a detective service but evidently wasn't actually either of those. While on a secretive job in which Lionel is a backup, Minna is killed and this prompts Lionel to set out to find the murderer. It involves a very twisted story with a variety of strange characters as Lionel became more and more drawn into the intrigue and suspense that makes for a very entertaining read.

Video-review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-uWL...
#3 in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIWkw...

Long story short: possibly the best detective novel ever written, certainly one of the best novels of the last twenty years. A beautifully orchestrated hard-boliled story that smells of pavement, incense and White Castle burgers, one that manages to be mercilessly real, breath-takingly beautiful and deeply deeply emotional. And don't make me start on the narrator because that's pure genius.

I recently listened to an Ezra Klein podcast interviewing Edward Norton about his new movie (based on this book) and thought it would be an interesting read. Norton and Klein warned that it was a noire detective novel (not my favorite genre), but also gushed about the character so I figured it would be better than average. Meh.

The story itself is rather silly and does not hold together very well at all. There is the necessary failing detective agency, the murder with several looming big guns in the shadows, and the stunningly attractive woman that knows everyone's secrets. Yep, just a trite noire.

The benefit is the main character, Lionel, who is rather intelligent and has a solid interior voice. Unfortunately for Lionel, his Tourette's makes his exterior voice not always solid. The best parts of the novel are some of Lionel's internal monologue:

"Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble."

"He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning or conflict. And he was too moronic to be properly self-loathing--so it was my duty to loathe him instead."

I will see the movie (I am a huge Norton fan and I think he will be amazing with this character), but I could have done without the book. I did enjoy the description of Don Martin's characters and the nod at MAD magazine humor.

Golden Dagger winners seldom disappoint and Motherless Brooklyn won't break this trend. It's an unique spin on the PI genre with the detective Lionel Essrog suffering from Tourette syndrome. A gimmicky idea no doubt but one that is executed nearly flawlessly. I knew very little about Tourette and Lethem does a commendable job of putting the reader in Lionel's shoes.

Tourette comes with a manic OCD that gives Lionel more quirks and tics that an amateur actor trying their hand at method for the first time. He gets fixated on certain words - joining unrelated ones, rhyming similar ones and changing syllables till he has explored every unthinkable indignity that he can heap on the language. Example: Lionel Essrog after a couple of edits becomes Line-Only Easy-Roger. Lionel is an easy character to root for because of his self-deprecatory humor. He recognizes it as a coping mechanism but he doesn't translate it into a plea for cheap sympathy, a temptation a lesser author would have found harder to ignore. The pathos comes from the fact that Lionel is quite smart yet relegated to being a clown due to a medical condition. Lethem strikes the right balance of funny and frustrating with Tourette. When the descriptions flourish with a garish grandiosity that would have made Chandler blush or when Lionel utters 'Eat Me' (his favorite tic) for the hundredth time, it did test my patience. But I never thought Lethem is making an ill-judged decision, my take was Lethem wanted us to completely understand Lionel's perspective.

Lionel along with a couple of other orphans are taken in by a low level con man Frank Minna as his all purpose Man Fridays. They run a detective agency as a front for their extralegal undertakings. Lionel's OCD makes him better at being a detective than at being a grifter. When Minna is murdered after a deal gone wrong, Lionel takes it upon himself to solve it. Lionel's relationship with Minna is developed throughout the book. An early chapter that shows us Lionel's childhood in an orphanage till he is taken in by Minna is one of the best written parts. It is a love letter to Brooklyn in the 60s. And Lethem shows off how layered his writing is. The reader essentially gets Lionel's first person perspective on Minna. He is a surrogate father, a man Lionel hero worships yet Lethem drops enough hints to show that Lionel's views are skewed. The narrator and the narrative essentially say different things without contradicting each other. Not easy to pull off but Lethem does it.

Lethem demonstrates time and again that he is better than the average crime writer but it is obvious he doesn't have a lot of experience writing crime. While most crime writers have a reverence for the genre, Lethem probably sees it as a guilty pleasure. That's the main problem with the book. The mystery and resolution are solid but the journey often lacks any tension. The plot is good but the plotting is not. It feels like a skit of a noir. The femme fatale is nice but the token love interest and big had bruiser just sort of exist, as if the genre has burdened Lethem with those laboring artefacts when he had little use for them. It might very well be a stylistic choice but one that didn't completely work for me.

Lionel adored Minna while he probably just tolerated him as an entertaining diversion. But Lionel's motivation still works, Minna gave him a sense of purpose no one else did. Similarly Lethem promises a noir and falters. But the book still works even if the mystery is one of its relatively weaker parts. Rating - 4/5.

Movie Review: Motherless Brooklyn is probably the most underrated movie of 2019. It was the best noir I have seen in almost 20 years. I think Norton was just captivated by the concept of having someone as unique as Lionel as the protagonist. So he keeps Lionel and his scenes with Mina from the book but diverges significantly from Demme's story at 25% of the way in. This is a more serious homage to old school noirs and better for it, the book was sometimes too cute for its own good. A bit too long at 140 minutes but a must watch for crime fans. And Norton is shaping up to be as good a director and a writer as he is an actor. Rating - 9/10

#Brooklynkids

Pensaba darle 4 estrellas. La novela no es perfecta y soy capaz de detectar los defectos. Pero si la novela hubiese sido la perfecta historia noir, ejemplar en contenido y ejecución, seguramente no me hubiera conmovido como lo ha hecho esta impresionante e imperfecta novela de detectives.

Porque Lionel Essrog es un personaje tan bien construido, tan sólido y distópico en su forma de estar en el mundo que todo cobra un nuevo sentido. Sus tics son un ventana desde la que ver de forma totalmente distinta ese Brooklyn que ha enraizado con fuerza en la consciencia literaria colectiva.

Es por eso, es por él, por lo que Lethem se merece entrar en el selecto club de la pentaconstelación.

Porque si su técnica es buena, su fondo lo es más. Porque esta historia se bebe con una facilidad pasmosa. Porque sus referencias comiqueras me parecen una delicia, porque de algún modo astuto me ha tocado en el hombro de una forma tan sutil que voy a tener que buscar su nombre en librerías, su timbre en licorerías, su enjambre en alcaldías, su hambre en ciertos días.

¡¡ÁMAME BAILEY!!

Completely unexpected good read! Peeking into the mind of someone with Tourette's was fascinating but the rest of the story with its gritty and unsentimental look at the life of a Brooklyn hood was unexpectedly charming and moving at times. The bonus-- a mystery where black and white were often shaded by grays! Glad I read it-- would make an interesting book club read!

CRITIQUE:

The Manic Choreography of a Motherless Brooklyn Boy

In 1979, Frank Minna plucked Lionel Essrog and three fellow orphans from St Vincent's Home for Boys in downtown Brooklyn, and fashioned them all into a workforce for a car service business and then a private detective agency. They call themselves the Minna Men.

Lionel has Tourette's syndrome. His tics include a kind of word association that is, at times, either amusing or insightful. This is how Lionel explains it:

n  
n  “Though I collected words, treasured them like a drooling sadistic captor, bending them, melting them down, filing off their edges, stacking them into teetering piles, before release I translated them into physical performance, manic choreography.”n  
n

Like “notes in a melody", it sometimes sounds like scat or jazz improvisation (although the soundtrack of the novel consists of Prince rather than bebop). However, over the course of the novel, it evidences Lionel building a complete language with which to investigate and understand the outside world. It's put to greatest effect, when Frank is murdered, and Lionel decides that, deprived of his mentor, he must “probably, gobbledy” be the one to find the killer.

Paltry Clues

Lionel is the first person narrator, so we get his carefully composed side of the story. I don't know enough about Tourette's to appreciate whether his affliction is accurately portrayed. He rarely seems to be frustrated by it. He always gets to achieve what he sets out to do (including finding the killer).

The clues are “paltry". Readers mightn't appreciate the significance of at least one of them (the Irving joke, “if Irving really was a clue”) until the second last chapter, in which Lionel solves the crime.

Words are a scaffold, “a way of touching the world, handling it, covering it with confirming language.” Words make the world tangible. You can use them to grasp, to identify, to differentiate, to highlight, to appreciate, to love and adore.

The Film

A few words about the film: I saw it when I still had six pages of the novel to read. However, by then, I was aware that the plots differed substantially.

The back story in the film (and hence the time setting) has nothing to do with the novel, and appears to be the creation of Edward Norton (based on a long term interest in the corrupt public planning official, Robert Moses), who is extensively discussed in the fifth essay/section of  Marshall Berman's book, "All That is Solid Melts into Air".

The Four Doormen and the Apocalypse

Norton seems to have balked at documenting the very different small time mobsterism, crime and corruption in the novel, not to mention the love interest in the two female characters, Julia and Kimmery (the former of whom barely features in the film, while the latter of whom is omitted from the film altogether, in favour of Laura Rose).

Whereas the film is set in the fifties, the novel flits between the Buddhist spiritualism of the hippie sixties and seventies, and the corrupt Manhattan materialism of the late post-me-decade nineties. The chapters dealing with the two women reminded me of the counter-culture idealism and Utopianism of Richard Brautigan. The later chapters hinted of Paul Auster in tone. Overall, the novel is very much the work of Jonathan Lethem, even if he borrows heavily from pulp and noir fiction.



VERSE:

The Girl from Nantucket
(For Julia)

There once was a girl from Nantucket
Whose dad kept his cash in a bucket
When her father succumbed,
Nan looked after her mum,
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

Final Eggnog in the Universe (Fujisaki Alibi Sacrifice)

Place of peace plate of peas piece of pie
Fountain mountain range strange
Clown frown downtown brownstone
Tracey bass baseball clay play golf roll
Ball fall call crawl drawl droll doll
Rough tough touch much such clutch
Best rest test toot zoot suit double breast
Tic tac tap trap rap rip hat trick zip me up
Bra bar tar car par star far near east
Hot tub club rub rubble double trouble
Hero hiero glyph squiggle prince kiss
Dance stance truck pluck fuck a duck
Fun run runt blunt gun flood blood shot
Tree flee fly away disperse desist resist arrest.





SOUNDTRACK:

Prince - "Kiss"

https://youtu.be/H9tEvfIsDyo

Prince - "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore?"

https://youtu.be/RLupM8X0jMk

“I went to my boom box and put on the saddest song in my CD collection, Prince’s ‘How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore.’ ”

Prince - "Mary Don't You Weep"

https://youtu.be/srwfAeXaTM8

Smoky Robinson and the Miracles - "The Tracks of My Tears"

https://youtu.be/rNS6D4hSQdA

The Turtles - "Happy Together"

https://youtu.be/mRCe5L1imxg

Eels - "Beautiful Freak"

https://youtu.be/QM6SNrmH0r8

Wynton Marsalis & Daniel Pemberton - "Woman in Blue"

https://youtu.be/cj-zk7hiFLY

Thom Yorke and Flea - "Daily Battles"

https://youtu.be/gFjep-baGuU

Wynton Marsalis & Daniel Pemberton - Theme from "Motherless Brooklyn"

https://youtu.be/6M4N-5LxNpQ

Lionel Essrog ha entrado a formar parte de un selecto club en el que ya ostentan su puesto personajes como Theo Decker, Cal Stephanides o Holden Caulfield. Sin duda, mi corazón lector se sentirá eternamente agradecido a Jonathan Lethem por descubrirnos a un protagonista tan singular, trágico y entrañable como este detective, empleado en una agencia de medio pelo, que pasea su particular trastorno psicológico por las calles de una ciudad carente de todo instinto maternal. Lethem hace del síndrome de Tourette algo más que una simple característica definitoria: lo convierte en un recurso narrativo, una forma inusual de ver y entender el mundo que no hace sino disparar los mecanismos que rigen nuestra sensibilidad y empatía. Sin embargo, Huérfanos de Brooklyn no es una novela perfecta. Y como tal, adolece de ciertas lagunas y estereotipos relacionados con el género al que se adscribe que delimitan la fuerza de su impacto. Aún así, me ha parecido una lectura fascinante y muy recomendable.

I had never heard of this book, nor the author. I picked this up in a secondhand bookstore and I'm glad I did! Motherless Brooklyn takes the form of a popular genre, gives it additional depth, and goes beyond the norm without ever violating the elements of that genre, in this case a crime-thriller-mystery.

This, without doubt, is a modern literary novel, and I am extremely fussy of such books, so fussy that I read them only on occasion, as I often find them pretentious and egoistic. Not this one. Fusing artful expression into what would normally be a genre crime novel results in something richly layered and multidimensional, lyrical, philosophical, yet still plot driven. A neat trick indeed. I admire the originality.

Motherless Brooklyn is hilarious, touching, and exciting.

Lionel Essrog, our hero, has Tourette's syndrome, and the treatment of this affliction is both insightful into the true nature of this condition, yet it also serves as a literary device for poetic wordplay. Even his own name can't escape this transformation: Lionel Essrog. Viable Guessfrog, Lionel Deathclam, Liable Guesscog, Ironic Pissclam. This aspect of the novel is quite ambitious. Lionel also suffers from compulsive traits that make him behave in a variety of peculiar ways, throwing up challenges he must overcome to solve the murder mystery and avenge a lifelong friend. But at the same time his oddities give him a unique cover - nobody takes him seriously.


Lionel grew up regarded as a freak by almost everyone, except Frank Minna, a small-time crook running slightly illegal petty rackets in Brooklyn, who had "adopted" Lionel and three other inmates of his orphanage and enlists them as his "Minna Men," i.e. his henchmen. Minna's murder at the beginning of the book drives the story, setting Lionel on a path of resolution.

Despite Lionel's tics and handicaps, he is intelligent, and of extremely moral character - a genuine flawed hero.

I did not agree with all of the author's viewpoints, particularly those concerning conspiracies, but that doesn't change my opinion that this book belongs on my mandatory re-read list. I'm not just saying this - I will definitely read it again, that's how satisfying it was.