- - - - Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
- - - - SECTION: Section 7; Page 7; Column 1; Book Review Desk LENGTH: 1437 words HEADLINE: What Makes Him Tic? BYLINE: By Albert Mobilio; Albert Mobilio received the 1998 National Book Critics Circle citation for excellence in reviewing. BODY: Motherless Brooklyn
JUDGING by the energetic catholicity of his literary appropriations -- the hard-boiled novel, science fiction, westerns and the academic novel -- Jonathan Lethem appears to be both a scholar and a wide-eyed fan of any and all genre fiction. Taking his cue from writers like Don DeLillo and Philip K. Dick, who successfully blurred the lines between serious and popular novels, Lethem is like a kid in a candy store, grabbing all the tasty plots and gimmicks he can. The title of Lethem's first novel, "Gun, With Occasional Music," set its tone of judiciously mixed spoof and homage. His last novel, "Girl in Landscape," gave elegant proof of his acute sense of genre convention; he so persuasively wove the plot of John Ford's classic western "The Searchers" into a tale of interplanetary travel that the joining felt not merely seamless but inevitable. The hybrid -- which also included an adolescent girl's coming-of-age tale -- cheated neither science fiction nor the western while giving birth to something fresh and strange. Unlike most straight genre practitioners, Lethem is in no hurry to get to his point; he is refitting the model for a slower drive with plenty of time to take in the sights. This is amply apparent nearly a third of the way into his new novel, "Motherless Brooklyn," another go-round with the hard-boiled genre. After the obligatory opening -- a stakeout that culminates in the murder of a detective's boss -- Lethem provides a dilatory flashback to fill us in on the principals: Frank Minna, a small-time operator and the chief eminence of a car service-detective agency in downtown Brooklyn, and his "Minna Men," the four orphans he more or less adopts from St. Vincent's Home for Boys. Surely, Ross Macdonald would never throw so big a stick into the spokes; Lethem not only takes this risk but further gums up the works by offering as his narrator the hapless gumshoe Lionel Essrog, who suffers from Tourette's syndrome. Essrog can hardly get out a sentence without jangling its sense with eruptions of "Stickmebailey!" or toss away someone's gun without having to throw another four things, including his shoe. Rituals like this tend to ruffle a detective's Bogart impression. Lethem makes Essrog's "Tourette's brain" virtually a character, as Essrog describes, with almost parental solicitude, the origins and mechanisms of its tics. He recalls how, as a child, Charlie Chaplin's and Buster Keaton's movies provided him with models, their characters "blazing with aggression, disruptive energies barely contained." When those energies burst forth from him, they produce a pun-rife spume of broken words: "friend of the deceased" becomes "mend the retreats," and Alfred Hitchcock mutates to "Altered Houseclock" or "Ilford Hotchkiss." Essrog's own name blurts out botched yet packed with portent: "Unreliable Chessgrub." These deliberately Joycean concoctions make up in glee what they lack in verisimilitude. Essrog's Tourette's never fades to a mere idiosyncrasy; indeed, one of the narrator's tics is to "relate everything to my Tourette's" and thus create a "meta-Tourette's." While this "ticcing" impedes the headlong rush you expect from a murder mystery, it offers other, headier pleasures, like a disquisition on how the dysfunction "teaches you to see the reality-knitting mechanism people employ to tuck away the intolerable, the incongruous, the disruptive." For Minna and his crew, Essrog is a "special effect," but the inscrutable boss values him as a "human freak show" because, since he seems crazy, everyone thinks he's stupid. Minna is the father that Essrog, Tony, Gilbert and Danny never had, and he dispenses a slightly cracked version of paternal wisdom. He favors big-chested gals because "a woman has to have a certain amount of muffling. . . . Otherwise, you're right up against her naked soul." Minna also wises them up to the "wheels within wheels," the "secret systems" that run downtown Brooklyn, and this includes introducing them to a pair of aging mobsters named Matricardi and Rockaforte. This pair send the orphans on oddball errands, like smashing up a Ferris wheel at a Hispanic carnival, but Minna has forbidden his men ever to mention their names. (He allows only Essrog's helplessly oblique version, "Garden State Bricco and Stuckface.") After Minna is stabbed and stuffed in a Dumpster in the book's opening pages, his band of ne'er-do-wells goes to work trying, in true "Maltese Falcon" style, to avenge the death of their colleague. The two brightest lights, Essrog and Tony Vermonte, take a somewhat stuttered lead, hampered as they are by mutual suspicions. Tony is masking not only his connections to the aging mobsters but his sexual relationship with Minna's widow, Julia. Essrog has always been smitten with her, so Tony's romance feels to him like a betrayal. For two days we trail Essrog around as he bumbles between Brooklyn and a Zen Buddhist school in Manhattan, slowly coming to understand the veiled world in which his mentor dwelled. Lethem's actual plot is hardly crackerjack detective material; the slow pacing and predictable turn of events -- standard-issue Mafiosi and an evil Japanese corporation play central roles -- reveal the genre model to be a convenient rack on which to hang his off-kilter humor and dead-on observations. About some building guards whose menace Essrog deflects by pulling out a business card, he notes, "They were a top grade of doorman, finely tuned, factoring vigilance against hair-trigger sycophantic instincts." This Chandler-like attention to social nuance jostles with cartoon comedy: Essrog is snatched off the street by four Zen devotees wearing sunglasses with price tags still attached, and he quickly names them Chunky, Indistinct, Pimples and Pinched. They argue over driving directions and over how best to scare him. Eventually, they beg Essrog's forgiveness, claiming to be "men of peace." It's in such parodies of detective novel set pieces that Lethem signals his fondness for the genre along with a prickly ambivalence. Clearly, he's a fan, but one who recognizes its weariness. When Essrog gets knocked on the head with a gun, the author steps on stage to comment: "So many detectives have been knocked out and fallen into such strange swirling darknesses, such manifold surrealist voids . . . and yet I have nothing to contribute to this painful tradition." But Lethem goes on to show that, in fact, he does: "Instead my falling and rising through obscurity was distinguished only by nothingness, by blankness, by lack and my resentment of it. Except for grains. It was a grainy nothing. A desert of grains." By acknowledging the overdone quality of the "knockout scene" yet challenging himself to enrich this device, Lethem plays a double game, one in which readers' expectations are the prize. TO meet the expectations predicated by the hard-boiled format, a writer must hit the right notes -- bloody crimes, tense interrogations, blind alleys -- and do so with snap, crackle and pop. Yet in the other novel Lethem wants to write -- an ambling Bildungsroman that meditates on language, neurology and the chemistry of perception -- those notes are really just background music. "You're speaking without thinking," one character tells Essrog, invoking offhandedly a familiar mind-body dualism that hardly requires neurological impairment -- all too often our mouths run untethered to our minds. But a detective should have his Cartesian ducks in a row. By littering the inductive process with babble, Lethem produces a Keatonesque detective who stumbles gracefully upon solutions rather than rooting them out. In "Motherless Brooklyn," solving the crime is beside the point. If you're a mystery maven, this might bother you. Instead, this is a novel about the mysteries of consciousness, the dualism Essrog alludes to when he talks about his "Tourette's brain" as if it were an entity apart from him. In a brief poetic interlude, he muses, "In Tourette dreams you shed your tics . . . or your tics shed you . . . and you go with them, astonished to leave yourself behind." Under the guise of a detective novel, Lethem has written a more piercing tale of investigation, one revealing how the mind drives on its own "wheels within wheels." Unlike the stock detective novel it shadows, the thriller in which clarity emerges on the final page, "Motherless Brooklyn" immerses us in the mind's dense thicket, a place where words split and twine in an ever-deepening tangle. http://www.nytimes.com GRAPHIC: Drawing (Nataliya Moroz) LOAD-DATE: October 17, 1999 - - - -
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