Motherless Brooklyn
Jonathan Lethem, 1999
Random House
311 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345803399
Summary
Lethem fulfills the promise of his earlier, critically acclaimed novels with the gritty and uproarious tale of a Brooklyn P.I. with problems: a dead boss, women trouble, and an uncontrollable case of Tourette's syndrome.
Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart language in startling and original ways.
Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable. When Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel's world is suddenly turned upside-down, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case, while trying to keep the words straight in his head.
A compulsively involving a and totally captivating homage to the classic detective tale. (From the publisher.)