Motherless Brooklyn

Motherless Brooklyn is a detective novel that knows that it is a detective novel, at once a readable, carefully plotted, and highly engrossing murder mystery and a knowing, wink-of-the-eye, tongue-in-cheek parody of the genre. Lionel Essrog frequently acknowledges the conventions of the genre and how his own unfolding investigation of Frank’s death mimics those standard elements: the violent and baffling death of a mentor; the obligatory car chases; the cliché stakeout scenes; the gradual inevitable revelation of the mysterious operations of the underworld; the siren-femme fatale; the comic-relief sidekick; the annoying, interfering flatfoot. Indeed, Lionel’s narrative voice-over echoes (even parodies) the voice-over typical of hard-boiled crime fiction, a voice-over that is gritty, clipped, no-nonsense, street-wise, and overly fond of strained and often clumsy metaphors. 

This mocking awareness of itself as a noir murder mystery gives the storyline of Motherless Brooklyn its ironic edge and keeps the reader a step back from getting too involved in the investigation into Frank Minna’s bloody death and the sprawling underworld of crime that Lionel gradually unearths. Indeed, the entire premise behind the Japanese corporation’s criminal enterprise is not drugs or guns, not prostitutes or high-end stocks, but a desire to corner the American market on a rare and exotic fish, a delicacy in Japan. 

Lionel’s Tourette’s creates a crazy gonzo sensibility to the murder mystery itself that fractures even the most dramatic showdowns and conversations Lionel conducts as an amateur sleuth. The novel, thus, is as much Raymond Chandler as Saturday Night Live, as much Elmore Leonard as Quentin Tarantino. Lionel’s tendency to suddenly erupt into a string of rhyming nonsense or his compulsion to suddenly touch or even kiss those he is talking with upends expectations of readers looking for a conventional murder mystery. We are never sure whether or even how to get caught up in the entangling web of violence, crime, and sex that is the novel’s mystery, our every gasp inevitably followed by a snicker. Motherless Brooklyn is thus a contested text, an exploration into how a genre works, how a genre becomes a genre, and how a tired and clichéd genre can be entirely repurposed. 

Motherless Brooklyn is a noisy narrative. Every major character at one point wishes for serenity and admits a longing for peace. As the wise guy Matricardi cautions a fretful Lionel, “You are afflicted and we feel for you. A man shouldn’t run, and he shouldn’t woof like a dog. He should find peace” (174). Far from the clichéd cool private eye, Lionel by his own estimation is stressed: “I’m tightly wound. I’m a loose cannon. Both—I’m a tightly wound loose cannon, a tight loose” (261). At moments during the investigation, Lionel relishes an odd moment of peace, a moment of calm in which he is unexpectedly (and gratefully) distanced from the noise and chaos of the street world of Brooklyn and the flood of information he gets, most of it lies and obfuscations. Given the constant internal chatter from his Tourette’s with its virtually non-stop and unstoppable flurry of words, Lionel not surprisingly seeks peace that is more than a simple respite. He admits his Tourette’s is eased only by the steady beat of syncopated music (he particularly likes the music of Prince), a greasy hamburger, and an orgasm (either while alone or with others). Other than that, he experiences peace only when he dreams, which is infrequent. 

Lionel, then, needs more than a rare moment’s peace. Kimmery introduces Lionel to the concept that Buddhism, with its complex acceptance of the world as it is, might give Lionel a more authentic and more durable peace. When Lionel tours the Zendo and later when he briefly attends a Buddhist prayer service, he feels an “absolute and utter serenity” (198) despite the presence of the very men he believes responsible for Frank’s murder. The narrative itself moves toward a Zen Buddhist retreat center along southern coastal Maine where, once again, Lionel feels a stillness even as the six intimidating enforcers from Fujisaki file into the restaurant where he sits. 

In the novel’s closing pages, we see Lionel at peace despite the untidy nature of the revelations about Frank and his death. Lionel is beyond vengeance: He no longer stews over his role in the death of the accountant Ullman. He will not search for Julia. He lets Kimmery go. He is detached from it all, finding in mystery itself a way to embrace rather than solve mystery: “Put an egg in your shoe,” he says in closing with hip, koan-like insight, “and beat it” (311). 

The author, Jonathan Lethem, does not have Tourette’s. Whenever an artist opts to explore a disability without direct experience (a fully ambulatory actor, for instance, who plays a wheelchair user or a sighted playwright who creates a blind character), that artist risks appearing to exploit that condition or worse, sentimentalizing the disability. Because Lethem has no direct experience of Tourette’s, Lionel’s verbal tics can come across at worst as a cheap gimmicky effect, at best as a tour de force that showcases Lethem’s own verbal dexterity, a mesmerizing performance at the expense of exploring the reality of those who have disabilities. 

In Motherless Brooklyn, however, Tourette’s syndrome emerges as more than a language impairment and much more than a literary gimmick. Tourette’s, far from a flaw or a disability, symbolizes Lionel’s emerging sensibility as a detective because. His disability, because it compels him to stay one step back from experience, makes him more sensitive to the moment, more involved with understanding the world because he struggles so profoundly to express that understanding. He speaks less, too aware of his uncontrollable tics, but that makes him value language all the more: “I collected words, treasured them […] before I translated them into physical performance, manic choreography” (47). 

In a novel where others abuse language to create elaborate deceits and elegant rationalizations, Lionel engages the world with more efficiency and honesty. Tourette’s has gifted him with the ability not to be surprised by the unexpected, to study what appears to be incongruous and glimpse within such obvious chaos larger patterns and meanings: “Tourette’s teaches you what people will ignore and forget. Teaches you to see the reality-knitting mechanism people employ to tuck away the intolerable, the incongruous, the disruptive” (43). The syndrome makes Lionel more attentive to the world that is for him at once “fragile and elastic” (44). The disability enables Lionel in the end to see the world for what it is and not despair.