Motherless Brooklyn Summary

Motherless Brooklyn By Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem was an American author born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Lethem graduated high school in Brooklyn and continued his education in Vermont at Bennington University. By his sophomore year, he decided to drop out of college and move to San Francisco, California to pursue his career in writing. Lethem is known for writing in the genre of science fiction. His success came pretty early when his novel Gun, With Occasional Music, was a finalist for the 1994 Nebula Award.

Two years after the arrival of his success in 1996, he decided to move back to his hometown Brooklyn where he began to write his novel, Motherless Brooklyn. After publishing this novel in 1999 Lethem was met with a great deal of success, yet again. It won the National Books Critics Circle Award for fiction and the Macallan Gold Dagger for crime fiction. Letham was referred to as a “genre blender” by the New York Times because of his ability to mix detective, science fiction, literary elements and autobiographical elements in his novels.

Some also referred to him as “something of a hipster celebrity.”

Motherless Brooklyn Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn is a novel set in Brooklyn published in 1999. The novel is a detective story about a man named Lionel Essrog and three others who set out to find their boss’s killer. Lionel Essrog is the narrator of this story. At the beginning of the novel, we learn that our detective suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, a psychological disorder that causes him to have random outbursts or compulsive behaviors.

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In the novel, he describes it in vivid details and uses phrases like “my mouth won’t quit” and “ventilating pressure off my head” to explain how he feels. So far throughout the novel, we can see that his Tourette’s syndrome is very significant in understanding the character. We learn how his mind works up the words he says and the actions he makes. This gives the novel a c…