Book
Motherless Brooklyn
Record details
- ISBN: 0375724834 (pbk.)
- ISBN: 9780375724831
-
Physical Description:
print
311 p. ; 21 cm. - Edition: 1st Vintage contemporaries ed.
- Publisher: New York : Vintage books, 2000, c1999.
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Private investigators -- New York (State) -- New York -- Fiction Tourette syndrome -- Patients -- Fiction Orphans -- Fiction Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) -- Fiction |
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- 1 of 1 copy available at Sitka.
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| Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bridge River Branch | AF LET (Text) | 35180200055993 | Paperbacks | Volume hold | Available | - |
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Monthly Selections - #1 July 1999
/*Starred Review*/ Here's a detective story with a unique twist: the narrator-protagonist, Lionel Essrog, out to solve the murder of his boss and mentor, suffers from Tourette's syndrome. Lethem's latest novel is a seriocomic takeoff on the genre that breaks down barriers by getting inside Lionel's head. It also tosses Zen Buddhism and the Mafia into the mix, treating both with a serious irreverence that other writers often shy away from. The plot's a simple one: someone has set up Frank Minna, the shady owner of a Brooklyn car service cum detective agency, for a hit. Years earlier, Minna had plucked four misfit teenagers from St. Vincent's Orphanage and chose them to be his errand boys. Now, as grown men, they work, or rather worked, for Minna as drivers/detectives. (Minna Men, declares Lionel.) One night, Lionel and another of the four, Gilbert Coney, stake out a Zen center on New York's Upper East Side while Minna, wearing a wire, goes in for a conversation. The upshot is that they screw up and Minna is "taken for a ride" and murdered in Brooklyn. Who ordered the hit? Was it the Zen abbot or perhaps two ancient Brooklyn godfathers who may or may not be homosexual lovers? Lionel's description of the investigation--complete with Tourette tics and observations--is a tour de force of language. The descriptions of the buildups to the tics are masterful, and the tics themselves, especially the verbal ones, are in the best tradition of the Zen non sequitur--thus neatly, and securely, tying the narrative and the plot. But the interesting thing is the subtle way in which the verbal outbursts work upon the reader: at first you are stunned, but in time, as with his colleagues, Lionel's strange behavior and outbursts merely extend the boundary of normal behavior. ((Reviewed July 1999)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews - BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 1999 October
October 1999 Charles Wyrick Thinking about certain writers often brings certain places to mind. Mention James Joyce, for instance, and one cannot help but think of Ireland. William Faulkner's name evokes images of the South, especially Mississippi. So from now on, when anyone says Jonathan Lethem, I will think - Brooklyn.In Lethem's novel, Brooklyn is a microcosm of surprising proportions. Here, nothing is as it seems. Almost every storefront hides some clandestine operation. The corner barbershop hosts high-stakes poker, and the local arcade runs numbers. Needless to say, crime is omnipresent.
Struggling to navigate this world of crime and illusion is Lionel Essrog, a third-rate private investigator suffering from Tourette's syndrome. Lionel is called "The Human Freakshow" by the other members in his detective agency. Yet his outbursts and uncontrollable tics endear him to his fellow P.I.s and their boss, the cranky, bull-headed Frank Minna.
For all his stubbornness, no one knows Brooklyn's underworld like Frank Minna. Lionel and the rest of the crew are dependent on Minna for their livelihood and well-being; so when Minna gets murdered, the "Minna Men" assume they are next. Figuring out who killed the boss is not only a matter of justice but an exercise in self-preservation for Lionel and the remaining members of this motley bunch.
Though intrigue and suspense are powerful ingredients in this fascinating novel, the real pull is its locale. Lethem's ear for street-level vernacular and his eye for gritty urban detail lend color to this imaginative portrait of Brooklyn, its history and its people. As Lionel slowly works his way through this challenging case, this inventive novel offers up a complicated vision of a place alive with mystery and crime.
Charles Wyrick is a musician and writer in Nashville. Copyright 1999 BookPage Reviews
- Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 1999 August #1
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 yarn 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 novel 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. Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 1999 July #1
The short and shady life of Frank Minna ends in murder, shocking the four young men employed by his dysfunctional Brooklyn detective agency/limo service. The "Minna Men" have centered their lives around Frank, ever since he selected them as errand boys from the orphaned teen population at St. Vincent's Home. Most grateful is narrator Lionel. While not exactly well treatedAhis nickname is "Freakshow"ATourette's-afflicted Lionel has found security as a Minna Man and is shattered by Frank's death. Lionel determines to become a genuine sleuth and find the killer. The ensuing plot twists are marked by clever wordplay, fast-paced dialog, and nonstop irony. The novel pays amusing homage to, and plays with the conventions of, classic hard-boiled detective tales and movies while standing on its own as a convincing whole. The author has applied his trademark genre-bending style to fine effect. Already well known among critics for his literary gifts, Lethem should gain a wider readership with this appealing book's debut. Recommended for most fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/99.]AStarr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, VA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 1999 May #1
Lethem follows up the successful Girl in Landscape with another on-the-edge tale: hero Lionel Essrog, a victim of Tourette's syndrome (which has been showing up a lot in fiction lately), comes under the protection of a local tough named Frank Minna and then must investigate Minna's mysterious death. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 1999 August #3
Hard-boiled crime fiction has never seen the likes of Lionel Essrog, the barking, grunting, spasmodically twitching hero of Lethem's gonzo detective novel that unfolds amidst the detritus of contemporary Brooklyn. As he did in his convention-smashing last novel, Girl in Landscape, Lethem uses a blueprint from genre fiction as a springboard for something entirely different, a story of betrayal and lost innocence that in both novels centers on an orphan struggling to make sense of an alien world. Raised in a boys home that straddles an off-ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge, Lionel is a misfit among misfits: an intellectually sensitive loner with a bad case of Tourette's syndrome, bristling with odd habits and compulsions, his mind continuously revolting against him in lurid outbursts of strange verbiage. When the novel opens, Lionel has long since been rescued from the orphanage by a small-time wiseguy, Frank Minna, who hired Lionel and three other maladjusted boys to do odd jobs and to staff a dubious limo service/detective agency on a Brooklyn main drag, creating a ragtag surrogate family for the four outcasts, each fiercely loyal to Minna. When Minna is abducted during a stakeout in uptown Manhattan and turns up stabbed to death in a dumpster, Lionel resolves to find his killer. It's a quest that leads him from a meditation center in Manhattan to a dusty Brooklyn townhouse owned by a couple of aging mobsters who just might be gay, to a zen retreat and sea urchin harvesting operation in Maine run by a nefarious Japanese corporation, and into the clutches of a Polish giant with a fondness for kumquats. In the process, Lionel finds that his compulsions actually make him a better detective, as he obsessively teases out plots within plots and clues within clues. Lethem's title suggests a dense urban panorama, but this novel is more cartoonish and less startlingly original than his last. Lethem's sixth sense for the secret enchantments of language and the psyche nevertheless make this heady adventure well worth the ride. Author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
