Motherless Brooklyn in Terminalcoffee

Feb 02, 2009 Chloe rated it it was amazing

Shelves: new-york, fiction, mystery-crime-thriller, hardboiled-and-noir

I have been on a bit of a mystery bender lately and I'm not quite sure what to make of that. Perhaps it's the return to the overcast North-West that sends me wanting to plumb the depths of human behavior. The gray skies and early sunsets bring out a curiosity about people's inner darkness which is always matched, measure for measure, by the capacity for redemption. Toughs with no visible qualities reveal a fierce dedication to recently killed compatriots. Prima facie immorality is revealed to be I have been on a bit of a mystery bender lately and I'm not quite sure what to make of that. Perhaps it's the return to the overcast North-West that sends me wanting to plumb the depths of human behavior. The gray skies and early sunsets bring out a curiosity about people's inner darkness which is always matched, measure for measure, by the capacity for redemption. Toughs with no visible qualities reveal a fierce dedication to recently killed compatriots. Prima facie immorality is revealed to be a cover for a rigid adherence to a moral code, something that seems necessary while swimming through the murky waters of crime and violence. Something within that pleases me to no end.

Which makes reading a Jonathan Lethem mystery even more satisfying. Few authors are as capable of writing with such exquisite skill as Lethem. It doesn't matter whether he's writing elegies to Philip K. Dick's lost genius or interviewing Bob Dylan, every word the man writes is one that I find myself increasingly compelled to read as though I, too, suffered from the OCD compulsions that drive Motherless Brooklyn's hero, Lionel Essrog. Lionel suffers from Tourette's Syndrome, a malady that, in the hands of a lesser writer, would quickly devolve into an extended stereotype and free-form fecal farce.

Yet with Lethem we get to peer inside Lionel's head as he tries to ride herd on his tics, struggling to avoid the triggers that will send him on a long and winding rant, all so that he can discover the identity of his mentor's killer. Along the way we are treated to a classic Lethem take on music and how Prince is the musical equivalent of Tourette's. I am, to be honest, quite taken with Lionel in a way that I haven't been since meeting Oskar in Jonathan Safron Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Though more than a couple decades separate these two characters they are, at the least, spiritual kin. Both meander the unfamiliar streets of Manhattan searching for clues to a father figure now gone, and you want to let both of them into your apartment for hot cocoa.

That is not to say that Motherless Brooklyn is all mental illness and sunshine. No, there is a classic story of murder, greed and ambition that swirls within the larger themes of faltering old crime families and the unspoken apartheid that builds walls across blocks of this New York borough. In short, this is Lethem at the top of his game and a book that is not to be missed. ...more

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Dec 20, 2018 Lee rated it really liked it

This is my first Lethem novel, and what a unique ride it was. A cross between a hard-boiled crime story and a literary novel...with it's share of sarcasm. And to boot, narrated by an amateur detective with Tourette's syndrome. With laugh out loud moments, but also tender and very moving. Mr. Lethem pulls it off. ...more

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Jun 17, 2007 Lisa rated it liked it

Lethem is such an excellent writer, he managed to make me interested in a bunch of petty, low-level gangsters, usually completely not my style. The main character was charming and pathetic, a man with no life and Tourette's disorder briefly finding a purpose. I'm looking forward to reading other books by Lethem. ...more

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