Pop quiz. Please complete the following sentence: "There are days when I get up in the morning and stagger into the bathroom and begin running water and then I look up and I don't even recognize my own _." If you answered face, then your name is obviously not Jonathan Lethem. Instead of taking the easy out, the genre-busting novelist concludes this by-the-numbers string of words with toothbrush in the mirror.

This brilliant sentence and a lot of other really excellent ones compose Lethem's engaging fifth novel, Motherless Brooklyn. Lionel Essrog, a detective suffering from Tourette's syndrome, spins the narrative as he tracks down the killer of his boss, Frank Minna. Minna enlisted Lionel and his friends when they were teenagers living at Saint Vincent's Home for Boys, ostensibly to perform odd jobs (we're talking very odd) and over the years trained them to become a team of investigators. The Minna men face their most daunting case when they find their mentor in a Dumpster bleeding from stab wounds delivered by an assailant whose identity he refuses to reveal--even while he's dying on the way to the hospital.

Detectives? Brooklyn? Is this the same Lethem who danced the postapocalypso in Amnesia Moon? Incredibly, yes, and rarely has such a departure been pulled off with this much aplomb. As in the "toothbrush" passage above, Lethem sets himself up with the imposing task of making tired conventions new. Brooklyn accents? Fuggetaboutit. Lethem's dialogue is as light on its feet as a prize fighter. Lionel's Tourette's could have been an easy joke, but Lethem probes so convincingly into the disorder that you feel simultaneously rattled, sympathetic, and irritated by the guy. Sure, the story is a mystery, but Motherless Brooklyn could be about flower arranging, for all we care. What counts is Lionel's tic-ridden take on a world full of surprises, propelling this fiction forward at edgy, breakneck speed. --Ryan Boudinot


From Publishers Weekly
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. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
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.-AStarr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, VA Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Albert Mobilio
Under the guise of a detective novel, Lethem has written a more piercing tale of investigation, one revealing how the mind drives on its own "wheels within wheels."



"Part detective novel and part literary fantasia...Superbly balances beautiful writing and an engrossing plot."


From AudioFile
Rather than imposing himself on the work, Steve Buscemi, a name familiar to anyone following modern film noir, adds to Lethem's brilliant novel, making it his as well as the author's. This detective tale is told from the point of view of Lionel Essrog, one of four orphans banded together by private detective Frank Minna. When their mentor is murdered, Essrog seeks to solve not only the crime, but also the meaning behind his boss's enigmatic agency. The real novelty in this work lies in the protagonist's Tourette's syndrome, which manifests in ticks, verbal ejaculations, and obsessive attention to details. Rather than making a joke or gimmick out of the neurological condition, the author treats it as a part of Lionel Essrog that is sometimes sad, often funny, and always human. Buscemi's rendering of the verbal ticks is handled subtly and effectively, without overdoing or lampooning the condition. S.E.S. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
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 plotwhich disappears for a while somewhere around the middle of the novelconcerns 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 Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

A Review of Motherless Brooklyn

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. Some smart, talented writer was going to figure out what Joycean possibilities for wordplay Tourette's syndrome affords, and I'm so glad Lethem got there before David Foster Wallace. This book is on the (very) surface an affectionate literary updating of the noir novel, but its genius lies in its depiction of its central character—Lionel Essrog, an orphaned young man afflicted with both Tourette's and hero worship—and its other central character, Brooklyn. This is a page-turner that's antic, funny, scary, and distinct. Lethem's ability to defy genre pigeonholes is special, and Motherless Brooklyn is his best book yet.

—Mark Winegardner

ANNOTATION

Winner of the National Book Critic's Circle Award for Fiction.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Tell your story walking."

St. Vincent's Home for Boys, Brooklyn, early 1970s. For Lionel Essrog, a.k.a. The Human Freakshow, a victim of Tourette's syndrome (an uncontrollable urge to shout out nonsense, touch every surface in reach, rearrange objects), Frank Minna is a savior. A local tough guy and fixer, Minna shows up to take Lionel and three of his fellow orphans on mysterious errands: they empty a store of stereos as the owner watches; destroy a small amusement park; visit old Italian men. The four grow up to be the Minna Men, a fly-by-night detective agency-cum-limo service, and their days and nights revolve around Frank, the prince of Brooklyn, who glides through life on street smarts, attitude, and secret knowledge. Then one dreadful night, Frank is knifed and thrown into a Dumpster, and Lionel must become a real detective.

As Lionel struggles to find Frank's killer—without letting his Tourette's get in the way—he's forced to delve into the complex, shadowy web of relationships, threats, and favors that make up the Brooklyn world he thought he knew so well. No one—not Frank, not Frank's bitter wife, Julia, not the other Minna Men—is who they seem. Not even The Human Freakshow.

All of the Lethem touches that have thrilled critics are here—crackling dialogue, sly humor, dizzying plot twists—but they're secondary to wonderfully full, tragic, funny characterizations, and a dazzling evocation of place. Indeed, Brooklyn—with its charming folkways and language, its unique style of bad-guy swagger and sentimentality—becomes itself a major character.

Motherless Brooklyn is a bravura performance:funny, tense, touching, extravagant. This novel signals the coming of age of a major American writer.

SYNOPSIS

Lethem fulfills the promise of his earlier, critically acclaimed novels with the gritty and uproarious tale of a Brooklyn P.I. with problems: a dead boss, women trouble, and an uncontrollable case of Tourette's syndrome.

FROM THE CRITICS

Washington Post

At once gripping, mournful, touching and comic...one of the greatest feats of first-person narration in recent American fiction. Philip Marlowe would blush. And tip his fedora.

Newsweek

...Philip Marlowe would blush. And tip his fedora.

Atlanta Journal Constitution

Some audio books make listening...more than a convenience and a mindless diversion. The author's work is enhanced, and the enjoyment of the reader-turned listener is heightened...Motherless Brooklyn is such an audio book""Part detective novel and part literary fantasia..."Superbly balances beautiful writing and an engrossing plot.

Library Journal

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 treated -- his nickname is "Freakshow" -- Tourette'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.

AudioFile