Orphaned Borough

Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Letham

       Published over ten years ago, I came to find this book in a really round-about way. I was with some friends killing time before going to have my birthday dinner in New York, when my friend suggested stopping into a small bookstore we were passing on the Upper East Side a few blocks from the restaurant. Inside the store, my friend found a copy of the author’s Chronic City and had me write the title and author down. When I got back from the trip, I checked out the author and picked up Motherless Brooklyn since both it sounded interesting and there was a long wait list for the newly-published Chronic City.

       The story is about Lionel Essrog, an orphan in Brooklyn who, along with some other boys from the local orphanage, is taken under the wings by a small-time shady character, Frank Minna. As the story opens, Minna, with Lionel and the other boys, runs a car service in New York, which fronts for an unlicensed “detective agency”. After spending years working for him, Frank Minna is murdered while on a job with Lionel listening in via transceiver. After trying to get help for his dying boss, Lionel sets out to solve the mystery surrounding who murdered the nearest thing he ever had to a father.

       The book masks itself as a mystery and detective story; however, while there definitely is a good mystery for Lionel to solve in the story, this is one case where the main character himself seemed almost more interesting than the mystery. Motherless Brooklyn is about and told by Lionel Essrog and he has a fairly strong case of Tourette's syndrome. His tics, both verbal and physical, earn him the nickname “The Human Freakshow” by Minna and the rest of Minna’s motley gang of “detectives,” making him an unlikely candidate for a detective trying to crack a murder case. 

It is difficult at times to find the somewhat calm reactions of other characters towards Lionel believable, with him nearly constantly shouting out tics like “eat me” while trying to get information out of them. You get the feeling that most of the characters in the book just have nothing but contempt for Lionel due to his Tourette’s; however, this and his relentless attempt to solve the mystery of his friend’s death make him utterly likable. More than once I forgot that I was reading a mystery rather than a character study on a very interesting man.

       Overall, I got a feeling at times that the detective story took a backseat to my interest in the main character, which in this case wasn’t a bad thing, especially since Lionel Essrog is probably more compelling as a character than the mystery of the plot itself. It’s an interesting tale with a very memorable character elevating the book.

Rating: 4 out of 5.