Motherless Brooklyn

“I chewed on a Castle instead and gazed out the windshield, brain going Characteristic autistic mystic tic dipstick dickweed.’”

This italicized passage while Lionel is on stakeout reveals the novel’s complex use of apparent nonsense to create an intricate sound-weave. We are invited to read the passage aloud and to allow the sense and nonsense to slide into each other, like the slider Lionel eats. 

“I set out to read every book in that tomblike library, every miserable dead donation ever indexed and forgotten there—a mark of my profound fear and boredom at St. Vincent’s and as well an early sign of my Tourettic compulsion for counting, processing, and inspection.”

The psychology of a young Lionel centers on his sense of loneliness and disconnection because he is unaware that his compulsions are elements of a condition. 

“Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.”

Tourette’s makes Lionel something of an existential philosopher. It provides him insight into how apparently disparate elements of his experience are in fact interrelated, even connected and how vulnerable those connections are to revision and realignment. 

“We developed a certain collective ego, a presence apart from the Home. We grew less embattled from within, more from without.”

Orphaned and growing up alone, Lionel yearns for the security of others. As one of Frank Minna’s crew, Lionel taps for the first time the synergy of a collective, although he will come to see this as an illusion as one by one each member of his group lets him down. 

“I made a ritual out of dialing their numbers and hanging up after a tic or two, or listening just long enough to hear another Essrog breathe.”

Desperate for family, Lionel reaches out, calling the Essrogs listed in the Manhattan phone directory. He never talks to any of them beyond a stumbling, stuttering hello—the calls thus exacerbate rather than alleviate his loneliness. 

“Minna spotted [his mother] and said, ‘This is exciting for you, Ma? I got all of motherless Brooklyn up here for you. Merry Christmas.’”

As part of his adolescent career as Frank Minna’s gofer, Lionel is invited to spend a traditional Christmas dinner with Frank and his mother. Frank defines Lionel—and the other Minna Men—as lost children denied the most fundamental nurturing bond. They are the motherless of Brooklyn.

“If we dared chime in, we’d surely only discovered more wheels within wheels. Business as usual. The regular fucking world—get used to it.”

Lionel needs to learn how the world works. His investigation reveals to him the paranoid certainty that nothing is what it seems, and everything is connected. 

“I might outsmart my symptoms, disguise or incorporate them; frame them as eccentricity or vaudeville, but I wouldn’t narcotize them, not it if meant dimming the world (or my brain—same thing) to twilight.”

Lionel must come to terms with his Tourette’s as a part of his ongoing search for his own identity. When Frank gifts Lionel the medical book on the syndrome, Lionel initially (and incorrectly) decides, now empowered, that he might control the disability. However, he draws the line at obscuring his awareness through drugs.

“‘You have such big hands, Lionel,’ Her voice was dreamy and singsongy, like a child, or a grownup pretending to be a child. ‘I mean—the way you move them around so quickly, when you do that thing you do, all that grabbing, touching stuff. What’s that called again?’ ‘That’s a tic, too, Julia.’”

In his initial interaction with the volcanic sensuality of the siren Julia, Lionel taps into how difficult it is for him to distinguish his powerful sexual drive and urges to touch from his life-long tics and spastic misdirected actions. 

“Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence?”

Lionel steps outside the narrative to speak directly to the reader, violating the fictive frame as it were (like an actor playing to the camera), and acknowledging that he is, in fact, a character in a murder mystery that we are, in fact, reading.

“Prince’s music calmed me as much as masturbation or a cheeseburger. When I listened to him, I was exempt from my symptoms.”

Locked with the furious energy of his Tourette’s, Lionel yearns for any respite, even temporary, from its chaos. He provides an extensive analysis of Prince’s syncopations to point out that within that controlled fury he finds a sort of peace.

“(in Tourette dreams you shed your tics) (or your tics shed you) (and you go with them, astonished to leave yourself behind).”

This slender four-line interlude, itself presented more like poetry in fragmented lines, striking typography, and eccentric punctuation, suggests the release Lionel, an asymptomatic insomniac, feels when at last his body succumbs to sleep. 

“Not thinking about it. One Mind, they call it. Like realizing that everything has Buddha nature, the flag and the wind are the same thing, that sort of stuff.”

Kimmery tries patiently to explain Buddhism to a skeptical Lionel. We see what Lionel resists: how Buddhism’s acceptance of the difficult realities of life rather than resistance to them could help Lionel in his struggle to both define and accept who he is. 

“She craned up on her toes and kissed my cheek. Startled, I couldn’t move, stood instead feeling her kiss-print burning on my flesh in the cold morning air.”

Against Lionel’s infatuation with the sensual Julia, he responds to Kimmery with romantic nobility (he wants to protect her) and with an emotional vulnerability. Julia is about the body; Kimmery is about the soul.

“Conspiracies are a version of Tourette’s syndrome, the making and tracing of unexpected connections, a kind of touchiness, an expression of the yearning to touch the world, kiss it all over with theories, pull it close.”

Lionel explains how his disability, which compels him to struggle with communication and sets him apart to watch a world he cannot entirely be part of, makes him an effective detective. He is able to sense in ways others cannot how the world is not ever what it seems. 

“The problem with you, Lionel, is you don’t know anything about how the world really works. Everything you know comes from Frank Minna or a book. I don’t know which is worse.”

Tony, pointing a gun at his fellow Minna Man, dismisses Lionel as detective. He is too naïve, too bookish, too introverted. Lionel’s investigation into the back story of his mentor becomes his introduction into how the world actually works.

“As I sat beside Kimmery, sheltered insider her tic-canceling field, I felt all the more keenly the uneasy, half-stoppered force of my own language-generator, my Multi-Mind, that tangle of responses and mimickings, of interruptions of interruptions.”

Kimmery and her embrace of Buddhism are Lionel’s best chance at spiritual calm and emotional redemption. Her loss at the end—not the loss of Frank Minna or Julia—marks Lionel as the traditional tragic/romantic hard-boiled detective.

‘Nothing’s wrong with you, at least according to a Zen outlook. That’s my whole point.”

As Kimmery explains the world to Lionel, if Lionel could open up to the Buddhist vision, he would no longer struggle against his disability, indeed no longer define Tourette’s as a disability at all. 

“My hand felt less a hand than a catcher’s mitt, or Mickey Mouse’s hand, something vast, blunt, and soft. I didn’t count her where I touched her. I conducted a general survey, took a tender sampling.”

As Lionel and Kimmery are about to make love, Lionel feels the grateful release from his Tourette’s and its awkward, spastic movements—the moment is, for him, a genuine moment of peace. 

“So the young monk is asking about [the dead monk] and the old monk says stuff like ‘Look at that dog over there’ and ‘Do you want a bath’—all this irrelevant stuff. It goes on like that until finally the young monk is enlightened.”

This koan anticipates Lionel’s own closing epiphany. A koan within Buddhism is less a lesson (like a Christian parable) and more a chance to frustrate the mind and, in turn, free it to move toward authentic revelation. Lionel will experience a series of koans that move him toward his final illumination at the lighthouse. 

“My whole life exists in the space between those words—tight, loose—and there isn’t any space there—they should be one word, tightloose.”

Lionel’s movement toward understanding himself begins here with his perception that opposition is itself an illusion, a perception that will ultimately allow him to accept a world of contradiction and paradox.

“I saw the shine of their bald heads in the orange light and I spotted the one who’d spoken of marshmallows and ghosts and bowel movements and picnics and vengeance and I knew, I knew it all.”

This is Lionel’s own koan—a moment apparently disconnected and unfocused and at complete right angles to the narrative itself—occasioned unexpectedly by the Japanese thugs filing into the restaurant in Maine. 

“Guilt like Tourettic utterance flows uselessly, inelegantly from one helpless human to another, contemptuous of perimeters, doomed to be mistaken or refused on delivery.”

Lionel, now at peace, rejects both guilt over his (indirect) part in two killings and vengeance against the syndicates responsible for Frank’s death as counterproductive, futile, and pointless.