Motherless Brooklyn

Lionel Essrog has Tourette's syndrome, and he narrates. Words come out of him doubled, rhymed, barked, and rearranged; he taps shoulders, straightens collars, and cannot leave a phrase alone, and Lethem makes the condition the engine of a detective novel rather than a quirk. Lionel was one of four teenagers Frank Minna pulled out of St. Vincent's Home for Boys in Brooklyn to move stolen goods and run errands, and as adults the four, Lionel, Tony, Danny, and Gilbert, are the Minna Men, staffing L&L, a car service that is really Frank's seedy and makeshift detective agency. On the first night of the book Frank is stabbed and dies, and Lionel, the one everyone calls Freakshow, decides to find out who did it.

The trail runs from Frank's widow Julia to a Manhattan Zen center where the Roshi turns out to be Gerard Minna, Frank's older brother; to the Fujisaki Corporation, the Japanese concern whose men pass through the Zendo as visiting monks; to a Polish giant who does the brothers' dirty work; and to Kimmery, a student at the Zendo who takes Lionel home, where he finds on her nightstand the pamphlet that points to Maine. The answer is a family one, what Publishers Weekly called a story of betrayal and lost innocence. Frank and Fujisaki's bookkeeper had been stealing from the corporation, and Gerard, to prove his loyalty to the Japanese, offered up his own brother; the giant did the killing. Lionel tails Tony and the giant to the Maine coast, where he finds Julia waiting tables at a Fujisaki restaurant fed by the sea urchin trade, learns the giant has killed Tony, wrecks the giant's car on a set of parking lot spikes, and ends a standoff with Julia by throwing both their guns into the sea. He gives Gerard's name to Frank's old mob clients, Gerard disappears, and Lionel goes back to L&L with Danny and Gilbert to make it the real detective agency Frank wanted.

The voice is the whole pleasure and it never flags: Kirkus called it a barrage of sheer rhetorical invention and Publishers Weekly a gonzo detective novel whose hero's compulsions turn out to be gifts for pattern finding. Albert Mobilio in the New York Times wrote that the book immerses us in the mind's dense thicket, a place where words split and twine in an ever deepening tangle. It is just over 300 pages, funny on nearly every one, and it suits readers of Chandler who are ready to be talked at by someone new.