Motherless Brooklyn (Paperback)

Petty hoodlum turned owner of a small time detective agency, Frank Minna assembled a team of four orphans and made them his loyal servants: the Minna Men. When Frank is stabbed to death on what was supposed to be a routine job, Lionel, one of the four, is determined to track down Frank's killer and avenge his death. One thing makes this something of a problem--Lionel has Tourette's syndrome, a collection of tics and compulsions which make him constantly break out in nonsense syllables or cause him to touch every object he sees. His advantage is that most people confuse his disability with stupidity; when he gets up a head of steam, the large slow-moving Lionel is extremely formidable. Taking us from a Zen study centre to a dangerous car park on the New England coast, Motherless Brooklyn is at the same time a brilliantly characterised detective novel and an inventive exploration of a particular tone of voice.

"Meanwhile, beneath that frozen shell, a sea of language was reaching full boil. It became harder and harder not to notice that when a television pitchman said 'to last the rest of a lifetime' my brain went 'to rest the lust of a loaf tomb' that when I heard 'Alfred Hitchcock', I silently replied 'Altered House clock' or 'Ilford Hotchkiss'."

What might have been exploitative--the portrayal of Lionel and his compulsions--is attractive, affirming and compassionate. The sense of Brooklyn as a city full of borderlines between communities, the legal and the illegal, life and death, is overwhelming. --Roz Kaveney --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

His publishers have launched Lethem's irresistible thriller with the Newsweek plaudits he had garnered: the author was named as one of the '100 People for the New Century'. To that they can now add the prestigious Crime Writers Association Award the book has picked up. If this means that readers will take up a writer new to them, that's all to the good, for this is a truly unique and flinty novel, shot through with sardonic humour and extremely quirky characterization. Lionel Essrog, aka The Human Freakshow, is a victim of Tourette's Syndrome (the uncontrollable impulse to declaim nonsense, touch all surfaces and other disturbing symptoms). And when a local tough guy and fixer, Frank Minna, adopts this adolescent protagonist (along with three other orphans from the St Vincent Home for Boys) and educates them to become members of his close-to-the-edge detective agency, Lionel's life is changed irrevocably. But when Minna (known as the Secret Prince of Brooklyn) is savagely killed, Lionel finds himself obliged to become a real detective, and is soon up to his neck in the murky world in which previously moved Minna. It became a cliche for television detectives to be disabled in some fashion, but any suspicions that Lethem will be going down that familiar path are soon ruthlessly expunged. This treatment of the protagonist's condition is both responsible and compelling, lending his narrative a hard-edged realism. (Kirkus UK)

A brilliantly imagined riff on the classic detective tale: the fifth high-energy novel in five years from the rapidly maturing prodigy whose bizarre black-comic fiction includes, most recently, Girl in Landscape (1998). Lethem's delirious yam about crime, pursuit, and punishment, is narrated in a unique voice by its embattled protagonist, Brooklynite (and orphan) Lionel Essrog, a.k.a. "Freakshow." Lionel's moniker denotes the Tourette's syndrome that twists his speech into weird aslant approximations (his own name, for example, is apt to come out "Larval Pushbug" or "Unreliable Chessgrub") and induces a tendency to compulsive behavior ("reaching, tapping, grabbing and kissing urges") that makes him useful putty in the hands of Frank Minna, an enterprising hood who recruits teenagers (like Lionel) from St. Vincent's Home for Boys, to move stolen goods and otherwise function as apprentice-criminal "Minna Men." The daft plot - which disappears for a while somewhere around the middle of the novell - Concerns Minna's murder and Lionel's crazily courageous search for the killer, an odyssey that brings him into increasingly dangerous contact with two elderly Italian men ("The Clients") who have previously employed the Minna Men and now pointedly advise Lionel to abandon his quest; Frank's not-quite-bereaved widow Julia (a tough-talking dame who seems to have dropped in from a Raymond Chandler novel) at the Zendo, a dilapidated commune where meditation and other Buddhist techniques are taught; a menacing "Polish giant"; and, on Maine's Muscongus Island, a lobster pound and Japanese restaurant that front for a sinister Oriental conglomerate. The resulting complications are hilariously enhanced by Lionel's "verbal Tourette's flowering" - a barrage of sheer rhetorical invention that has tour de force written all over it; it's an amazing stunt, and, just when you think the well is running dry, Lethem keeps on topping himself. Another terrific entertainment from Lethem, one of contemporary fiction's most inspired risk-takers. Don't miss this one. (Kirkus Reviews)