Books by author: Jonathan Lethem

I picked this out at Wordsworths while hanging out with Adam on one of his too-rare trips to Boston. We each bought a copy, and I'm curious to know what he thought of his.

I, frankly, was disappointed. Lethem seeds an interesting premise: the protagonist's girlfriend falls in love with a laboratory curiosity — a void with a peculiar sort of intelligence. Although Lethem explores this idea in an interesting way, the characters are never developed such that you'd really care what happens to them. No one in the novel is likable, and the twist ending leaves you thinking "so what?" This short novel probably should have been a short story. Lethem shows enough promise, however, that I'll willing to try something else by him.

It's hard for me to believe that I've read over fifty books since I finished As She Climbed Across the Table. At the time, I wrote that I'd be willing to give Lethem another chance, and now I'm glad that I finally did so. Motherless Brooklyn is quite an improvement over Table.

In Brooklyn, Lethem spins a detective story of sorts, where the protagonist is a high-school dropout, an orphan with Tourette's syndrome. His name is Lionel Essrog, but his friends call him "freakshow", and he's been "adopted" by a small-time gangster named Frank Minna. When Minna is murdered during a job that goes badly, Lionel — fighting Tourettic tics and outbursts at every turn — attempts to find the killer and bring him to justice.

Although Motherless Brooklyn is at face value a detective novel, it's really more of a character study, and Lethem explicitly pokes fun at some of the detective-story cliches as he uses them. Lionel Essrog is an interesting character, and I found myself rooting for him despite the fact that I never really liked him. (Come to think of it, none of the characters in the novel are at all likeable.) Overall, I enjoyed Motherless Brooklyn, but I'm not in a hurry to read more Lethem. He's a capable and talented writer, but I haven't fallen in love with his writing.