Read Motherless Brooklyn Online
Authors: Jonathan Lethem
Motherless Brooklyn
or
JONATHAN LETHEM’
s
MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN
“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.’ ”
–The New York Times Book Review
“Who but Jonathan Lethem would attempt a half-satirical cross between a literary novel and a hard-boiled crime story narrated by an amateur detective with Tourette’s syndrome? … The dialogue crackles with caustic hilarity.… Jonathan Lethem is a verbal performance artist.”
–The Boston Globe
“Part detective novel and part literary fantasia, [
Motherless Brooklyn
] superbly balances beautiful writing and an engrossing plot.”
–The Wall Street Journal
“Intricately and satisfyingly plotted.… Funny and dizzying and heart-breaking.”
–Luc Sante,
Village Voice Literary Supplement
“A tour de force.… With one unique and well-imagined character, Jonathan Lethem has turned a genre on its ear. He doesn’t just push the envelope, he gives it a swift kick.”
–The Denver Post
“Aside from being one of the most inventive writers on the planet, Lethem is also one of the funniest.”
–San Francisco examiner
&
Chronicle
“In Essrog.… Jonathan Lethem has fashioned a lovably strange man-child and filled his cross-wired mind with a brilliant, crashing, self-referential interior monologue that is at once laugh-out-loud funny, tender and in the honest service of a terrific story.”
–The Washington Post Book World
“A true risk-taker.… Lethem uses a familiar genre as the backdrop for his own artistic flourishes.”
–The Hartford Courant
“Wildly inventive.… Jonathan Lethem has a knack for pushing commonplace ideas to absurdly literal ends.”
–City Pages
“Marvelous.…
Motherless Brooklyn
is, among other things, a tale of orphans, a satire of Zen in the city and a murder mystery.”
–Time Out New York
“Finding out whodunit is interesting enough, but it’s more fun watching Lethem unravel the mysteries of his Tourettic creation.”
–Time
“Wonderfully inventive, slightly absurdist.… [
Motherless Brooklyn
] is funny and sly, clever, compelling and endearing.”
–USA Today
“Utterly original and deeply moving.”
–Esquire
“Motherless Brooklyn
is a whodunit that’s serious fiction.… Lethem is a sort of Stanley Kubrick figure … stopping off in flat genres to do multidimensional work, blasting their hoary conventions to bits.”
“A pure delight.”
–The New York Observer
“A detective story, a shrewd portrait of Brooklyn, a retold
Oliver Twist
and a story so baroquely voiced (the hero has Tourette’s syndrome) that Philip Marlowe would blush. And tip his fedora.”
–Newsweek
“Wildly imaginative.”
–Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Funny, delightfully complicated and so outrageously inventive that no pitch could do it justice.”
–Baltimore Sun
“A multi-layered novel that’s fast-paced, witty and touching.… Prose diatpunches its way down the page, every word loaded with energy and ready to explode.”
–The Oregonian
“Compulsively readable.… Genuinely entertaining.… Improbably hilarious.… Lethem is at his peak Nabokov-meets-Woody-Allen verbal frenzy.”
–Bookforum
“Most rewarding.… Delightfully oddball.”
–The New Yorker
“Motherless Brooklyn
is Lethem’s finest work yet-exciting, strange, original, hilarious, human and soulful.”
–The Memphis Commercial Appeal
“A staggering piece of writing.… On the edge of genius.… The accents, class distinctions, highways, neighborhoods, grocery stores, flavors, scents and, yes, car services in a certain corner of [Brooklyn] are made vividly tangible, arising from these pages as if scratch-and-sniffs were embedded in the margins.”
–San Jose Mercury News
“Imagine the opportunities to explore language that arise when the narrator of a novel has Tourette’s syndrome.… Unforgettable.”
–Los Angeles Times
JONATHAN LETHEMMOTHERLESS BROOKLYN
Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers
The Fortress of Solitude
, which was a
New York Times Book Review
Editors’ Choice for one of the best books of 2003, and
Motherless Brooklyn
, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named novel of the year by
Esquire
. His stories and essays have appeared in
The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The New York Times
, the
Paris Review
, and a variety of other periodicals and anthologies. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and in Maine.
by
JONATHAN LETHEM
Men and Cartoons
The Fortress of Solitude
This Shape We’re In
Motherless Brooklyn
Girl in Landscape
As She Climbed Across the Table
The Wall of the Sty, the Wall of the Eye
(Stories)
Amnesia Moon
Gun, with Occasional Music
WITH CARTER SCHOLZ
Kafka Americana
AS EDITOR
The Vintage Book of Amnesia
The Yearest Music Writing 2002
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, OCTOBER 2000
Copyright © 1999 by Jonathan Lethem
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:
Lethem, Jonathan.
Motherless Brooklyn / by Jonathan Lethem.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3562.E8544M68 1999
813′.54-dc21 99-18194
eISBN: 978-0-307-78912-9
Authorphotograph © Mara Faye Lethem
v3.1
For my Father
Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I’m a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster.
I’ve got Tourette’s
. My mouth won’t quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I’m reading aloud, my Adam’s apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghostf themselves, husks empty of breath and tone. (If I were a Dick Tracy villain, I’d have to be Mumbles.) In this diminished form the words rush out of the cornucopia of my brain to course over the surface of the world, tickling reality like fingers on piano keys. Caressing, nudging. They’re an invisible army on a peacekeeping mission, a peaceable horde. They mean no harm. They placate, interpret, massage. Everywhere they’re smoothing down imperfections, putting hairs in place, putting ducks in a row, replacing divots. Counting and polishing the silver. Patting old ladies gently on the behind, eliciting a giggle. Only—here’s the rub—when they find too much perfection, when the surface is already buffed smooth,
the ducks already orderly, the old ladies complacent, then my little army rebels, breaks into the stores. Reality needs a prick here and there, the carpet needs a flaw. My words begin plucking at threads nervously, seeking purchase, a weak point, a vulnerable ear. That’s when it comes, the urge to shout in the church, the nursery, the crowded movie house. It’s an itch at first. Inconsequential. But that itch is soon a torrent behind a straining dam. Noah’s flood. That itch is my whole life. Here it comes now. Cover your ears. Build an ark.
“Eat me!” I scream.
