This month features Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem, Faber, 0571203167, £5.99 |
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I recently went to see Jonathan Lethem read from his new novel, The Fortress of Solitude, at the new-ish London Review Bookshop. He was intelligent, amusing, jet-lagged, had great hair and teeth – all the things you’d expect of ‘one of America’s hottest young writers.
For the reading, Lethem sat on a chair at a table. This exaggerated what was already a pretty clear top-body/ bottom-body divide.
Above the table, Lethem wore a well-cut jacket and an open-neck shirt; below, jeans and baseball boots.
I’m only going into this writer’s appearance (not something I usually like do) because I think it’s useful shorthand for the writing.
Motherless Brooklyn is that lion or liger of a hybrid beast (less weird than a sphinx, less mundane than a mule) the literary thriller.
In other words, it has what are usually seen as higher and lower functions: to be an-attempt-at-literature and to raise your heartrate – respectable above the table, a little more relaxed, perhaps even a bit trashy below.
Motherless Brooklyn, to make this very clear, isn’t annoyingly self-conscious and neither is it crap at describing action. These being the most obvious flaws of literary thrillers.
But it is self-conscious to the extent that it’s aware of its own genre and hyper-aware of its own language; and this partly comes from the fact, and partly exploits the fact, that the main character, Lionel Essrog, has Tourette’s syndrome.
This means that he tics, verbally and physically. If he does something once - touches a dashboard, locks a door - he has to do it five or six times, depending which number is currently dominates his universe. When he meets someone he often adjusts their collar, to get it straight. But most noticeably, he shouts loudly and in a way that appears Eatmebailey uncontrolled, madly angry. This often happens in the middle of an otherwise calm conversation. (Not that any thriller has that much room for calm conversations.) For example: ‘We’re – Detectapush! Octaphone! – we’re a detective agency.’
At one point, Lionel tells us or writes (this isn’t made clear): ‘Have you noticed yet that I relate everything to my Tourette’s? Yup, you guessed it, it’s a tic. Counting is a symptom but counting symptoms is also a symptom, a tic plus ultra. I’ve got meta-Tourette’s. Thinking about ticcing, my mind racing, my thoughts reaching to touch every possible symptom. Touching touching. Counting counting. Thinking thinking. Mentioning mentioning Tourette’s. It’s sort of like talking about telephones over the telephone, or mailing letters describing the location of various mailboxes.’
Here, I think, we have both the above table (‘a tic plus ultra… I’ve got meta-Tourette’s.’) and the below (‘Yup, you guessed it… It’s sort of like…’).
Lionel, I should probably have said already, is an orphan. ‘I grew up,’ he says/writes, ‘in the library of the St. Vincent Home for Boys, in… downtown Brooklyn…’
The library, added to his Tourette’s, is, we are supposed to believe, the explanation of the above table Lionel. He’s more than capable of self-conscious literary digression; digression - Eatme! - isn’t second nature to him, it’s first.
The literary argument of Motherless Brooklyn, and for me at least it’s a convincing one, is that life isn’t realistic (realistic as in realist novels), it’s literary. The common-sense voice, the deadbeat tone of the flatfoot, is one of the most literary of all.
‘Assertions are common to me, and they’re also common to detectives. (“About the only part of a California home you can’t put your foot through is the front door” – Marlowe, The Big Sleep.) And in detective stories things are always always, the detective casting his exhausted, caustic gaze over the corrupted permanence of everything and thrilling you with his sweetly savage generalizations. This or that runs deep or true to form, is invariable, exemplary. Oh sure. Seen it before, will see it again. Trust me on this one.’
After the Cold War we learnt that rank-and-file members of the KGB used to love watching bootleg copies of James Bond films. Some of them probably found their vocation that way. The higher-ups and the techies got ideas for techniques, bugs, weapons from M’s briefings.
This isn’t just a case of ‘Life Imitates Art’. It’s more a wail of screaming feedback in which Art is Jimi Hendrix’s Fender Stratocaster and Life is his stack of Marshall amps. Hendrix is the Artist – in both Life and Art, using one to play the other, sometimes with his fingers, sometimes his teeth.
Did I mention, there’s a murder to be investigated? Frank Minna, who borrowed Lionel and his three buddies from the Orphanage, set them up as removals men, cab drivers and, finally, as a detective agency.
Late in the book, Lionel gets into an argument with one of these buddies:
‘The problem with you, Lionel, is you don’t know anything about how the world really works. Everything you know comes from Frank Minna or a book. I don’t know which is worse.’
‘Gangster movies.’…
‘What?’
‘I watched a lot of gangster movies, like you. Everything we both know comes from Frank Minna or gangster movies.’
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Author interviews
