Motherless Brooklyn

Lethem shapes protagonist and wannabe detective Lionel Essrog within the literary tradition of urban crime fiction that began in the 1920s and 1930s. At moments throughout the narrative, Lionel acknowledges elements of that tradition and his own familiarity with the genre’s books and movies. Much like classic hard-boiled detectives such as Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and Mike Hammer, Lionel Essrog combines street-smart savvy and idealistic, even romantic naivete. He lives in a shadowy world where any ideals are inevitably rendered ironic and unworkable. By the end, Lionel sheds his innocence and moves into awareness: He comes to see that clear sight is not the same as insight. 

Like those iconic detectives, Lionel is a loner and misfit, living apart from the world. He comes to us an orphan—we are never given the backstory of his childhood or how he came to be in the home for boys. Of course, his Tourette’s, with its uncontrollable verbal tics and unfocused physical gyrations, has further alienated him. Lionel is alone and isolated, in search for the validation of family and the possibility of love. At one point, he even randomly phones the three Essrogs listed in the Manhattan telephone directory, desperately reaching out to find some sense of belonging. Thus, for him Frank Minna is considerably more than an employer or two-bit wise guy. He is the father Lionel never had but so desperately needs and the role model upon which he will build his life. Frank introduces Lionel to the street and to the underworld network of crime, betrayal, and greed that Lionel only gradually perceives. 

Like those traditional detectives, Lionel is perceptive, keen to observe, and intellectually restless. He relies on his innate ability to judge situations, calculate risk, assess characters, and draw clean conclusions. He is fiercely intelligent, an auto-didact, a self-taught street philosopher. His mind continuously races, and he cannot abide mystery. He pursues the tangled leads in his investigation into Frank’s murder with dogged persistence and diligence. 

For all his street-smarts, Lionel has an aching and open vulnerability, a heart more than ready to be broken. First, he cannot shake his immediate attraction for Frank’s widow, an attraction as much carnal as it is his displaced need for a mother (hence the novel’s title). But it is Kimmery who changes him by introducing him to the wisdom of Buddhism that ultimately allows Lionel to find the peace for which he so desperately yearns. He quickly falls in love with Kimmery after barely glimpsing her entering the Zendo. Under Kimmery’s subtle teaching, Lionel emerges in the end able to live in a world of contradiction and mystery. Of course, within the tradition of the hard-boiled detective, he ends up alone, his heart at peace, now certain that it can live without love in a world that it will never understand. 

What makes Lionel Essrog anything but a conventional detective, however, is his disability. Lionel argues that Tourette’s actually helps as a detective, that Tourette’s gives him a keener eye and a more alert focus on the world. Because of his disability, he is positioned perfectly for detecting how the smallest clues can be constellated into a grand solution to a mystery. Because he must deal every moment of every day with the functions (and malfunctions) of his brain, Lionel is particularly sensitive to how the brain itself works. Detective work, for Lionel, is fundamentally the art of finding connections, a “kind of touchiness, an expression of the yearning to touch the world, kiss it all over with theories, pull it close” (178).