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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.
Literature is unfortunately not safe from commodification of culture. ''Money makes the world go 'round'' they say, so nothing is. Capitalist society is one big giant sausage machine that transforms original ideas into mediocre, mass produced objects that eventually become drained of all their meaning. That's why artists are important. Real, genuine artists like Jonathan Lethem. His deconstruction of traditional detective novel MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN might not win any awards for tension, but it is and will remain a testament to how original and dynamic detective fiction can be, when it is fueled by new ideas.
The twist that makes MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN unique is that it's protagonist, Lionel Essrog has tourette's syndrome. He is also employed by a private security agency owned by local mobster and father figure to neighborhood kids Frank Minna. When Minna unexplainably pops in and gets stabbed during a routine stakeout, Lionel's fragile balance is thrown off. Holding on to his moral values for only compass, he vows to find Frank's killer. Lionel and his tourette's syndrome go into the dark Brooklyn night with one idea for only beacon.
The usual problem with deconstruction in fiction is that it's often an exercise in vanity. It's one thing to pick a concept apart and expose its bare bones, but the challenge lies in reappropriating it and make it your own coherent thing. Lethem took great care to build an actual mystery around his deconstruction of the detective novel, which was a nice delicacy to readers. Torturing the form is a great way to show how keen and analytical of a reader you are yourself, but it's an idiosyncratic exercise. The adventures of Lionel Essrog are the deconstructed part of MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN, but he lives in a world inhabited by genuine hardboiled characters and while some of them are thin, they respect the conventions of the genre to a certain extent. Think of MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN as an ancestral house furnished and decored by a radical postmodern interior stylist.
Minna Men wear suits. Minna Men drive cars. Minna Men listen to tapped lines. Minna Men stand behind Minna, hands in their pockets, looking menacing. Minna Men carry money. Minna Men collect money. Minna Men don't ask questions. Minna Men answer phones. Minna Men pick up packages. Minna Men are clean shaven. Minna Men follow instructions. Minna Men try to be like Minna, but Minna is dead.
Language also plays an important part to MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN, through Lionel and his relationship to tourette's syndrome. There is obviously a tremendous amount of research that was made about the mechanics of the condition, yet it was Jonathan Lethem's idea to have fun with it all along. So Lionel is a bona fide tourettic person, but he is also a walking linguistic joke. Now, I have no idea if his treatment of tourette's syndrome was offensive to people suffering from the actual condition, but it was entertaining to me. Lethem used a factor that was both exterior to the protagonist and his antagonists as a vector of events. It got annoyingly playful at times, but the awkward collisions of characters who were connected through Lionel's disease kept it's interest to me overall.
MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN will probably only survive in Jonathan Lethem's cannon. It does not have the staying power to be a detective novel classic or the literary genuis to provoke an uproar in the intellectual community. It will remain an interesting anomaly in the bookish landscape that will remind us with every reading that genres are always suceptible of becoming mass-produced objects drained of artistic value. It's the kind of fair warning that literary deconstructionism should always be about. There is a small place for books like MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN in literary history.
