Motherless Brooklyn

Here’s the thing: you are Jonathan Lethem, bookish writer, raised by bohemian parents in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn, as a kid read a lot — books, magazines, the newspaper — graduated high school and went to college. Now, you write a novel called Motherless Brooklyn about a street tough you kind of knew in the Brooklyn neighborhood where you grew up, but didn’t really hang with. Your main character, an oversized orphan with Tourette’s Syndrome who works for a small-time crook (who works for some big-time Mafioso) sounds like, well, a well-read guy who might have grown up in a quasi-tough Brooklyn neighborhood, but read a lot of books. This literate-sounding, or literature-inclined protagonist, is a cliché that, in novel after novel, keeps getting in the way of the story. Pruitt, from Jame Jones’ From Here to Eternity comes to mind. Pruitt was a liberal wet dream—he played a mean bugle, boxed like a heavyweight champ, and kept a secret list of books he wanted to read. We were supposed to love him because he loved books. But we didn’t (that is, until, we saw Montgomery Clift in movie). In Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, we get Lionel Essrog, a “human freakshow” because of his tics and obscene squeals. The Tourette’s and the abuse and the orphanage are supposed to tug our heart strings. Only they don’t. Instead, they make us think of Lethem, feverishly thumbing through his Oliver Sacks books, trying to get the tics and word-cataracts right. Yet after all that work, Essrog, like Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces, feels constructed, devoid of the spontaneity and mannerisms and threatening glares and sudden bursts of violence that scared us shitless during our accidental confrontations with certain Brooklyn morons in the early 80s. The fakeness goes from slightly annoying to really irritating when Essrog, tailing a bad guy, drives out of the city towards New England:

I’d seen trees before—so far Connecticut offered nothing I didn’t know from suburban Long Island, or even Staten Island. But the idea of Connecticut was sort of interesting…The traffic tightened as we skirted a small city called Hartford.

Cute, this presumption that Essrog, who. in his 20s or 30s, and has been all over New York City, has never heard of Hartford. Likewise for the other characters in the novel: Gerard, the street-tough-turned Zen master; Kimmery, the naïve Zen novice Essrog boinks; the Polish giant who kills his boss and beats him up; the black detective who is terrified of these Brooklyn low-lifes; and finally Julia, who, we are to believe, grew up in Nantucket and becomes a bleached-blond, tough-talking, boink-everyone-with-an-X-chromosome, Brooklyn moll.

The book, from the narrator’s highly-literate first line (“Context is everything”) to the contrived ending, has been a stupendous marketing success: Lethem won a McCarther “genius” award, and pretention meister Edward Norton is turning it into a movie. We don’t care about any that shit. The book sucks because Essrog is just not believable.