Motherless Brooklyn

"Lethem is quite a literary science fiction writer. He had a rocket takeoff to his career. He had written ten or so unsuccessful novels before he finally sold his first one, a noir book called Gun, With Occasional Music , that’s Raymond Chandler by way of Salvador Dali. Whatever it was he cracked in writing that book gave him the wherewithal to go back to those ten trunk novels and fix them up, and so he had this incredible firecracker string of brilliant books come out, one after the other. At the tail end of that, we got Motherless Brooklyn , which is a story about a private eye who has Tourette’s. He is part of a gang of private eyes. They’re the muscle men, leg men, bag men and goons of a well-known private eye about Brooklyn. They are all orphans that this guy took out of an orphanage and raised to be his sidekicks. I’m not really doing this justice, because this sounds like quite a silly premise, and it is. Part of the charm of this book is its self-awareness about the silliness of this. The book opens with their mentor and father figure, Frank Minna, going missing. It’s the story of how the Minna men—this gang, his sidekicks—try and solve the mystery of what happened to their boss. One of the things that very quickly becomes apparent is that the boss was the brains of the outfit, and none of them knows much about how to solve a mystery. Another thing that becomes apparent is that the protagonist, who has Tourette’s and is often belittled or mocked by his peers, is the smartest of the bunch but is roundly ignored. We learn very early on that he is heartbreakingly naïve, and that his worship of his boss, his understanding of his place in the world, and the importance that he brings to his life as a Minna man are all grossly misplaced. This is another one of those disillusionment novels. It’s not a novel about an unlicensed cop, but it is a novel about someone who thinks that they’re doing good in the world, who discovers that they have been someone else’s patsy all along. The voice of the character is, for obvious reasons, quite distinctive and very good. Lethem is quite a lyrical, comic, and absurdist writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music , is a hardboiled mystery about furries—not humans in fur suits, but actual anthropomorphic animals—and while this is set in a gritty, contemporary Brooklyn, it’s no less willing to be a little self-deprecating, a little surreal, and quite funny. It also has quite a sting in its tail because you fall in love with this character, and you see what’s coming before he does. There’s a sense of watching the protagonist in a horror movie go into the basement, when you know what’s there but for some reason, they keep heading towards it."