Book 4 - Motherless Brooklyn

Motherless Brooklyn

By, Jonathan Lethem

311 pages - 3.50 stars

This is another of those books that ends up on my Amazon wishlist and I have no real recollection of where I got the recommendation. In writing this post I did a quick search for the title and it turns out the book is not a new one - it was published back in 1999 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

Huh, well look at that.

I picked it off my wishlist, got it as a gift for Christmas, and started reading it earlier this year with little to no expectations. Motherless Brooklyn tells the story of some low level, petty criminals who get involved in some larger schemes (inadvertently for some) and are thrown in to the crime family arena. It follows some standard crime novel, hard boiled, detective fiction plot paths and tricks but it's a good book. Even though it stays true to its genre, it's inventive enough that it doesn't feel like just another detective novel.

Lethem's characters are cliche in some ways but they still feel three-dementional and he throws the reader a curveball with his narrator - who suffers from tourette's - but manages to not become a caricature in the novel. For the most part, you know Lionel (the tourettic detective) through his inner narration, a 1st person's account of what's happening via the play by play in his head. His tourette's only makes itself known in his interactions with the others in the book and in this Lethem manages to make Lionel a vulnerable character that you identify with. Because you know him through his internal voice he never seems like the "freak show" that he seems to others around him so the reader builds an affinity and a loyalty to Lionel, wanting to shield him from the cruelty of everyone else; even as he's physically beating a suspect.

I'm not gonna spoil the mystery for you but only partially because I want to save it for you. The mystery seems almost secondary to Lionel's story in the book so months later what I remember is him and not the surprising ending.

An interesting tidbit: my google search also returned an IMDB listing for a movie "in development" of the same title. Slated for 2013, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

Check out the Salon Review here.