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"Motherless Brooklyn"
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Lionel lives at the mercy of compulsions: to curse, to touch people and things, to echo and recombine words, to blurt out embarrassing thoughts. Lionel is hulking, funny, bookish, brilliant and horribly isolated: Aside from panic and mind-numbing drugs, sexual intimacy is pretty much the only thing that calms his tics (which gives some idea of the painful ironies at Lethem's disposal). Minna, by contrast, is a free agent: a witty street-corner hero who gets most of his self-respect from the adoring kids he calls, collectively, "Motherless Brooklyn."

In return Minna becomes their surrogate mother -- and their Brooklyn. He incarnates the tiny, mostly Italian neighborhood around Court Street that becomes, to Lionel and the others, "the only Brooklyn, really." From Minna Lionel learns the neighborhood's verbal style: "An endearment was flat unless folded into an insult. An insult was better if it was also self-deprecation, and ideally should also serve as a slice of street philosophy, or as a resumption of some dormant debate." And Lionel learns to see the neighborhood through Minna's eyes:

Hippies were dangerous and odd, also sort of sad in their Utopian wrongness. ("Your parents must of been hippies," he'd tell me, "That's why you came out the superfreak you are.") Homosexual men were harmless reminders of the impulse Minna was sure lurked in all of us. "Classic" minorities -- Irish, Jews, Poles, Italians, Greeks and Puerto Ricans -- were the clay of life itself, funny in their essence, while blacks and Asians of all types were soberly snubbed, unfunny. It was a form of racism, not respect, that restricted blacks and Asians from ever being stupid like a Mick or Polack. If you weren't funny, you didn't quite exist.

It's harder to say which comes more fully alive in the novel's first third, Minna or his borough. And when "Motherless Brooklyn" moves to the present day, and Minna is murdered, the borough -- and Lionel's powers of observation -- seem to die a little, too. As in Lethem's earlier detective novel, "Gun, With Occasional Music," the whodunit aspect of this novel is preposterous. Unlike "Gun," a very funny homage to Raymond Chandler, the second part of "Motherless Brooklyn" is a pastiche of cop shows and comic books -- high-speed car chases, a malevolent Polish giant, Mafiosi more "Godfather" than Gotti, a sexy widow suspect, a gang made up of doormen, a cult of sinister Zen tycoons, a mysterious woman who finds Lionel's disorder attractive ... and very little Brooklyn. Once Minna drops out of the story, Brooklyn vanishes, too, as Lionel travels to the wilds of Manhattan and even as far as Maine in his search.

You might say Lethem's holding a mirror up to the real Brooklyn, where he grew up and now lives after a 10-year stay in California. The Minnas and Essrogs have largely been replaced by yuppies --in particular young writers, editors and critics (if anyone really got rid of Frank Minna, it was Lethem's readers). "Motherless Brooklyn," Lethem freely admits, is the novel of his return. It sprang, he says "from the initial intoxication of my reunion, the rush of recognition and excitement I got from walking in my old footsteps and hearing people talk."

The recognition is partial. Lethem feels keenly how much the neighborhood has changed, but notes that even the working-class Italian Brooklyn depicted in "Motherless Brooklyn" is something of a dreamscape. "It's a fantasy of the Brooklyn I grew up in fulfilled in all its romantic potential. It's a best-case scenario that all the mugs hanging out in front of the barbershop were really the neighborhood fixers, immensely powerful figures. The truth is they were probably just mugs with nothing better to do than hang around."

Those barbershops have become cafes and antique stores. "It's a book about denial," Lethem explains. "Lionel and the Minna Men are a barrier holding back what's coming, the gentrification and Manhattanization. It's not Frank Minna's neighborhood anymore." And Lethem is careful to note that the Brooklyn he grew up in was never really Frank Minna's, either. The son of hippie parents, he spent his early childhood in a quarter of the borough where he was one of very few white kids and where regular beatings and muggings came with the territory. "I closely resemble the Manhattan hordes that have taken over the neighborhood," he says, "but I paid my dues. I can sit and drink a $4 latte on a corner where I vividly remember having had a knife held to my throat." Lethem says his next novel will deal with the tensions that riddled the version of Brooklyn he knew best as a child. "The topic I flinched from in 'Motherless Brooklyn' is the one I want to pursue now: race."

It was only when he got to junior high school that Lethem met white kids -- Italians like Minna and his second-in-command, Tony -- who felt they "owned" their neighborhood. For Lethem, Lionel gets to live out a fantasy of joining that brotherhood and knowing "what is it to be grounded and to feel at home somewhere. Most of my friends were white, but they were not like me. There were very few hippie kids. Admiring Frank Minna has to do with wanting to feel his sense of inheritance."

So, with an irony worthy of, well, a Jonathan Lethem novel, this writer has come back to a hometown that's entirely different, and yet full of people very much like himself. "I feel extremely comfortable here. I belong to the neighborhood. It just isn't the place it was. And I'm typical of the neighborhood now. I walk down the street and see people I know."
salon.com | Sept. 23, 1999

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