#31: Reading

My book club's selection for June was Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Letham, which is a National Book Critic's Circle Award Winner.

I'm a little surprised my book club chose this novel--it turned out to be the type of book I'd normally read on my own: mystery? (check!), detective? (check!), quirky main character? (check!). Naturally, I really liked it. Of course, the only other gal at the meeting had only read about 100 pages in, and she was ready to throw it down. The third gal at the meeting hadn't even started it, and none of our other members were able to attend. I, on the other hand, used the meeting as an excuse for K and I to rush back into Austin from spending three days at the in-laws'. heh.

But, back to the book. The main character, Lionel, grew up as an orhpan with Tourette's Syndrome. When his mentor/father figure is killed, he decides he'll solve the case. I thought his character was very well-written without becoming a caricature. I would even read another book starring Lionel, and it would make a great movie. (Edward Norton supposedly acquired the movie rights and is working on a script for a movie he'll star in--I'd definitely watch that!)

From Kirkus Reviews:

A brilliantly imagined riff on the classic detective tale: the fifth high-energy novel in five years from the rapidly maturing prodigy whose bizarre black-comic fiction includes, most recently, Girl in Landscape (1998). Lethem's delirious yarn about crime, pursuit, and punishment, is narrated in a unique voice by its embattled protagonist, Brooklynite (and orphan) Lionel Essrog, a.k.a. "Freakshow." Lionel's moniker denotes the Tourette's syndrome that twists his speech into weird aslant approximations (his own name, for example, is apt to come out "Larval Pushbug" or "Unreliable Chessgrub") and induces a tendency to compulsive behavior ("reaching, tapping, grabbing and kissing urges") that makes him useful putty in the hands of Frank Minna, an enterprising hood who recruits teenagers (like Lionel) from St. Vincent's Home for Boys, to move stolen goods and otherwise function as apprentice-criminal "Minna Men." The daft plot—which disappears for a while somewhere around the middle of the novel—concerns Minna's murder and Lionel's crazily courageous search for the killer, an odyssey that brings him into increasingly dangerous contact with two elderly Italian men ("The Clients") who have previously employed the Minna Men and now pointedly advise Lionel to abandon his quest; Frank's not-quite-bereaved widow Julia (a tough-talking dame who seems to have dropped in from a Raymond Chandler novel) at the Zendo, a dilapidated commune where meditation and other Buddhist techniques are taught; a menacing "Polish giant"; and, on Maine's Muscongus Island, a lobster pound and Japanese restaurant that front for a sinister Oriental conglomerate. The resulting complications arehilariously enhanced by Lionel's "verbal Tourette's flowering"—a barrage of sheer rhetorical invention that has tour de force written all over it; it's an amazing stunt, and, just when you think the well is running dry, Lethem keeps on topping himself. Another terrific entertainment from Lethem, one of contemporary fiction's most inspired risk-takers. Don't miss this one.