Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

Homosexual men were harmless reminders of the impulse Minna was sure lurked in all of us—and “half a fag” was more shameful than a whole one. Certain baseball players, Mets specifically (the Yankees were holy but boring, the Mets wonderfully pathetic and human), were half a fag—Lee Mazzilli, Rusty Staub, later Gary Carter. So were most rock stars and anyone who’d been in the armed services but not in a war. Lesbians were wise and mysterious and deserved respect (and how could we who relied on Minna for all our knowledge of women argue when he himself grew baffled and reverent?) but could still be comically stubborn or stuck up. The Arabic population of Atlantic Avenue was as distant and unfathomable as the Indian tribes that had held our land before Columbus. “Classic” minorities—Irish, Jews, Poles, Italians, Greeks and Puerto Ricans—were the clay of life itself, funny in their essence, while blacks and Asians of all types were soberly snubbed, unfunny (Puerto Ricans probably should have been in this second class but had been elevated to “classic” status single-handedly by West Side Story—and all Hispanics were “Ricans” even when they were Dominicans, as they frequently were). But bone stupidity, mental illness, and familial or sexual anxiety—these were the bolts of electricity that made the clay walk, the animating forces that rendered human life amusing and that flowed, once you learned to identify them, through every personality and interaction. It was a form of racism,...