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Pop quiz. Please complete the following sentence: "There are
days when I get up in the morning and stagger into the bathroom
and begin running water and then I look up and I don't even
recognize my own _." If you answered face, then your name
is obviously not Jonathan Lethem. Instead of taking the easy
out, the genre-busting novelist concludes this by-the-numbers
string of words with toothbrush in the mirror.
This brilliant sentence and a lot of other really excellent
ones compose Lethem's engaging fifth novel, Motherless Brooklyn.
Lionel Essrog, a detective suffering from Tourette's syndrome,
spins the narrative as he tracks down the killer of his boss,
Frank Minna. Minna enlisted Lionel and his friends when they
were teenagers living at Saint Vincent's Home for Boys, ostensibly
to perform odd jobs (we're talking very odd) and over the
years trained them to become a team of investigators. The
Minna men face their most daunting case when they find their
mentor in a Dumpster bleeding from stab wounds delivered by
an assailant whose identity he refuses to reveal--even while
he's dying on the way to the hospital.
Detectives? Brooklyn? Is this the same Lethem who danced the
postapocalypso in Amnesia Moon? Incredibly, yes, and rarely
has such a departure been pulled off with this much aplomb.
As in the "toothbrush" passage above, Lethem sets himself
up with the imposing task of making tired conventions new.
Brooklyn accents? Fuggetaboutit. Lethem's dialogue is as light
on its feet as a prize fighter. Lionel's Tourette's could
have been an easy joke, but Lethem probes so convincingly
into the disorder that you feel simultaneously rattled, sympathetic,
and irritated by the guy. Sure, the story is a mystery, but
Motherless Brooklyn could be about flower arranging, for all
we care. What counts is Lionel's tic-ridden take on a world
full of surprises, propelling this fiction forward at edgy,
breakneck speed. --Ryan Boudinot
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