Motherless Brooklyn

Lethem presents two facets to Lionel and uses italicized passages to convey Lionel’s struggle. There is the narrative Lionel who tells the story: his voice is clear, exact, syllable-crisp, streetwise, accessible, even elegant, its phrasing replete with clever metaphors and striking turns of phrase. Then there is the conversational Lionel who snatches bits and pieces from conversation and stymies any attempt at clarity. We are even given access to Lionel’s ragged, jagged interior monologues that seem as first nonsense: “Garden state bricko and stuckface garbage face grippo and suckfast snakle ticc-o and circus” (164). However, such passages reflect Lionel’s panic, a bizarre hodgepodge that collapses in nonsense words.

The novel does not simply ape the aphasia that plagues Tourette’s patients for gimmicky effect, nor does the novel resort to sentimentalizing Lionel as a victim of a genetic error. The novel never mocks Lionel’s impairment, nor does it make him a hero because he struggles with the disorder. Rather, the novel engages, even celebrates Lionel’s reinvention of language as an entirely original force, a creative energy. Lionel’s riffs repurpose sounds and syllables and create entirely original wordplay that is at once riveting (and realistic) and at the same time delightful and engaging. Far from being tangential to the plot or passages that can be skipped, in these passages Lionel essentially forges an entirely private language. 

The italicized passages beg to be read aloud. The reader discovers an intricate fusion of word fragments, that fusion defining a bold and unnervingly immediate language that recalls the verbal virtuosity of writers as disparate as Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) and James Joyce (Finnegans Wake). Lionel’s language is freed to delight the ear and the eye and to remind us that language itself is an invention. 

Motherless Brooklyn is a detective novel, specifically a murder mystery. Indeed, within the first few pages, a major character is kidnapped and knifed repeatedly by an unknown assailant, his bloody body left in a garbage dumpster. Our narrator is himself an aspiring private investigator, and, with appropriate diligence, begins the arduous and painstaking work of classic criminal investigation. Lionel gathers clues and begins to track down even the flimsiest leads: he scrutinizes the crime scene, interviews witnesses, conducts stakeouts, and even follows suspects across four states, all to ultimately identify the killer. His dogged dedication to solving the mystery drives Lionel. 

Lethem frames the narrative to play on readers’ expectations of a murder mystery: We expect the investigation to involve false leads, red herrings, witnesses who lie, friends who double cross, and elaborate charades in a shadowy world where no one can be entirely trusted. However, readers also expect some closing revelation, a clarification of mystery into a solution, a tidy and reassuring sense of closure. Accordingly, Lethem provides the killer’s identity before the novel’s close, but for all Lionel’s detective work and dogged investigation, he does not actually solve anything: Julia Minna’s packaged explanation upturns the genre, making this an unconventional murder mystery. 

Despite Lionel understanding the chain of events that led to his mentor’s murder, a far bigger, existential mystery persists. Lionel grapples with reconciling the two versions of Frank: Frank embodied elements of good and bad, both a compassionate, surrogate father and ruthless criminal. To Lionel, Frank is a moral paradigm—one both heroic and villainous. Throughout the novel, characters gradually reveal their paradoxical nature to Lionel. That greater mystery, in the end, introduces Lionel to a stark and terrifying contemporary world of “wheels within wheels” (74), a world without moral integrity, without defined ethics, and without clear definitions.