Motherless Brooklyn

It sounds like a crazy idea - a crime novel featuring a detective with Tourette's syndrome - but Motherless Brooklyn succeeds brilliantly. The plot is summarised thus: Lionel Essrog has an uncontrollable urge to shout out nonsense, touch everything in reach and rearrange objects. As a boy, he is taken up with three of his friends by Frank Minna, a small-time fixer. Over time, they become the Minna-Men, a detective-agency-cum-limo-service, spending their days and nights in Brooklyn, driving around the city or hanging around the office. One day, Frank is murdered and the Minna Men have to start taking their detective work more seriously if they are going to track down his killer.

Naturally, Lionel's illness renders him less than ideally-suited to his new role; his friends may be used to - and entertained by - his outbursts, but strangers find it mighty strange when he reaches out and taps them on the shoulder. Nevertheless, he is dogged in his pursuit of the murderer and like all characters in crime novels, has several blind alleys to explore before solving the case.

Lethem's exploration of Tourette's syndrome in the book gives him the perfect excuse to play with language, twisting the words in Lionel's mouth and mind into strange, new configurations. When a cop asks if Lionel is a friend of the deceased, he is powerless to prevent himself from replying, "Trend the decreased! Mend the retreats! - sure, that's right." Even when he's not shouting out loud, his brain ticks over relentlessly: "Tourette's slipdrip stinkjet's blessdroop mutual-of-overwhelm's wild kissdom." It makes for hilarious reading, but Lethem writes with real sympathy about the ceaseless commotion in Lionel's head and conveys something of the exhaustion inherent in the condition: "My words begin plucking at threads nervously, seeking purchase, a weak point, a vulnerable ear. That's when it comes, the urge to shout in the church, the nursery, the crowded movie house. It's an itch at first. Inconsequential. But that itch is soon a torrent behind a straining dam. Noah's flood. That itch is my whole life. Here it comes now. Cover your ears. Build an ark."

Jonathan Lethem's previous books have been loosely classified as science fiction, but this is to limit their appeal. Gun, With Occasional Music, in particular, is a fast-paced, genre-busting future-noir thriller complete with gun-toting kangaroo. However, in Motherless Brooklyn, with its New York City setting, its complex plotting and its sympathetic protagonist, he has come back down to earth to write his best novel yet.



Also by Jonathan Lethem (and published by Faber)

Girl in Landscape
As She Climbed Across the Table
Gun, With Occasional Music
Amnesia Moon
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (stories)