Motherless Brooklyn A Noir

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Noir has many forms, both in film and in novel, and because noir can appear in so many forms, a connoisseur of this genre must have a set of specific rules and specifications that are required for any noir, film or not, to have in order to be classified as a noir. There are many novels out there in the world, most novels in fact, that contain elements of noir, but don’t contain enough elements to be fully classified as a noir novel.

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One of these novels is Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. Lethem’s novel takes place in New York, as is evidenced by the title, which is a popular setting for noir-themed novels or films. The novel also has death as a prominent topic during the plot of the novel, also a common noir element. The main element of the novel which can lead one to believing that this novel is not necessarily a true noir, is the main character.

The main character is called Lionel Essrog, what makes him so interesting is that he is afflicted with a rare mental disease known as Tourette’s. Lethem’s unlikely gumshoe compels him to constantly tap and smack objects, shout whatever is on his mind at the worst moments possible, basically a version of OCD on steroids. “My mouth won’t quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I’m reading aloud, my Adam’s apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks empty of breath and tone.

(If I were a Dick Tracy villain, I’d have to be Mumbles).” (Lethem 1). Lionel’s disease affects him greatly throughout the novel, but it does not stop him from accomplishing his mission for vengeance. Jonathan Letham's Motherless Brooklyn explores a new angle of noir by keeping the theme of death and solving a murder but making the noir unique by having the main character be unconventional due to his mental illness, and having the story be more comedic than dark and mysterious.

Tourette’s syndrome is one of, if not the main, theme of the novel. Tourette’s is defined by the Tourette Association of America as, “Tourette Syndrome is one type of Tic Disorder. Tics are involuntary, repetitive movements and vocalizations. They are the defining feature of a group of childhood-onset, neurodevelopmental conditions known collectively as Tic Disorders and individually as Tourette Syndrome, Chronic Tic Disorder (Motor or Vocal Type), and Provisional Tic Disorder. The three Tic Disorders are distinguished by the types of tics present (motor, vocal/ phonic, or both) and by the length of time that the tics have been present” (Tourette).

Lionel’s character is one of the few who exist in novels such as these, it’s not every day that you see a mentally handicapped main character in a detective novel. Lionel’s uniqueness is better described by an article written by Harvey Blume on the subject of neurological narratives,

“Consider, for example, the phonetic and semantic mayhem wreaked on the spoken word by Lionel Essrog, a detective by trade and the main character of Jonathan Lethem's novel Motherless Brooklyn (1999). When a pal of Essrog's jokes, 'How do you titillate an ocelot?' and delivers the punch line 'You oscillate its tit a lot,' Essrog goes into verbal convulsions. 'Eat me Ocelot!' he screams, followed by 'Lancelot ancillary oscillope Octapot! Tittapocamus!' Essrog has Tourette's syndrome, which in his case is as susceptible to wordplay as some seizure disorders are to strobe lighting. Essrog's verbal volatility is among the qualities that make him a desirable foil for Lethem, whose interest in wordplay, human oddity, and broad physical humor is manifest throughout his work”

Blume’s analysis tells us that Essrog’s illness afflicted him greatly not only as a normal man, but even more so as a detective trying to solve the murder of his father figure, Frank Minna. Minna’s life was short and shady, taking odd jobs here and there with his older brother Gerard. Frank was murdered, leaving behind a group of misfit orphans that he practically raised with his own two hands. These dysfunctional orphans, now grown men, were employed under Minna as a makeshift detective agency/limo service, more so a limo service than detective agency. It was Lionel who took that step to make it a true detective agency once Frank was avenged. These orphans, now called the “Minna Men” had their lives centered around Frank, especially Lionel. To Lionel, the Minna Men and Minna himself were the only ones that would ever accept him as a fully functioning human being. It was difficult for people that he would investigate to fully take him seriously and not dismiss him as another insane person roaming the streets of New York. It is not until Lionel is a young man that he is able to fully realize what it is that afflicts him every moment of every day. Frank, surprisingly, is the one who hands him a book describing the illness that has been with him as long as he can remember,

“Then he pulled a book out of his pocket, a small paperback. I don’t think I’d ever seen a book in his hands before. ‘Here’, he said to me. He dropped it on the pavement and nudged it under the fence with the toe of his shoe. ‘Take a look’, he said. ‘Turns out you’re not the only freak in the show.’ I picked it up. Understanding Tourette’s Syndrome was the title, first time I’d seen the word. ‘Meaning to get that to you’, he said. ‘But I’ve been sort of busy.’’ (Letham 81).

This exchange between Frank and Lionel is one of the only moments where we see Frank act like a father to Lionel. This is also where we see why Lionel treasures him so much, and that Frank favors Lionel over the other boys. We never really get a clear answer as to why Frank favors Lionel, however, this is the prime example of Frank caring about Lionel more than Lionel being his “employee”.

Lionel reflects on what he has learned about his illness, from experience and from the novel that Frank gave him, when he is introducing each member of the Minna Men,

“Tourette’s teaches you what people will ignore and forget, teaches you to see the reality-knitting mechanism people employ to tuck away the intolerable, the incongruous, the disruptive—it teaches you this because you’re the one lobbing the intolerable, incongruous, and disruptive their way. Once I sat on an Atlantic Avenue bus a few rows ahead of a man with a belching tic—long, groaning, almost vomitous-sounding noises…my colleague’s compulsion was terribly specific: He sat at the back of the bus, and only when every head faced forward did he give out with his masterly digestive simulacra…To all but me he was surely a childish jerk-off, a pathetic wino fishing for attention (maybe he understood himself this way too—if he was undiagnosed, probably so). But it was unmistakably a compulsion, a tic—Tourette’s” (Letham 43-44).

Lionel’s definition and example of his disease paints a clear picture of what it is like to live with a disease such as this. He continues this description throughout the novel as we live vicariously through him. He goes into more detail later on in the novel, “For every tic issued I squelched dozens, or so it felt—my body was an overwound watchspring, effortlessly driving one set of hands double-time while feeling it could as easily animate an entire mansion of stopped clocks, or a vast factory mechanism” (Letham 47). Blume goes into what Lionel has defined his illness to be in his article about the novel,

“Essrog's Tourette's includes something he calls 'meta-Tourette's,' a compulsion to ceaselessly scan the environment for anything that could be remotely compared to the syndrome. He finds such a likeness in the tunnel walls of the New York City subway system, which, like the tunnel walls of his brain, are layered 'with expulsive and incoherent language.' He finds another likeness in conspiracy theory, which, he feels, displays a Tourettic 'yearning to touch the world, kiss it all over with theories, pull it close.' (Blume 2).

Lionel’s illness does not stop him from solving the murder of his mentor and friend. Lionel was able to find the true tormentors of his “family” of other orphans, the men who employed Minna for strange jobs were the ones who were ultimately the cause of Frank’s demise. This combined with Lionel’s illness make him a far more dynamic character than we have seen in any other film noir, for example Dix Steele.

Steele is certainly an interesting character in his own right. However, he is still far more stagnant than Lionel. Steel is not sure of what he wants, he simply goes after a certain craving that he cannot satiate. He goes after everyday women in search of fulfillment. He finds a woman the thinks is the one to fulfill his gaping soul, however his anger comes out in their unhealthy relationship and he nearly kills her. Dix Steele is the very definition of a stagnant character, he learned nothing during his relationship with Laurel and is left at the end of the film in a lonelier place than when he started. Lionel, on the other hand, makes great strides as he grows up. With Frank’s help, he is able to discover what his disease is and how he can control it, as much as he is able to anyway. And, despite his illness and people’s dismissal of him altogether, he was able to avenge his father figure, solve a murder, and save his surrogate family of other orphans from living under the thumbs of the same two mob bosses who murdered Frank. Lionel Essrog makes a far better detective, ironically, than most of the other detectives that appear in different examples of noir, film or not. This is one of the reasons why this novel challenges the ideas of noir. Lethem has taken the ideas of noir, murder, mystery, dark tones, etc., and warps them into a story that is more comedic than dark and gives us a character that we empathize with in more ways than a tragic backstory.

Blume backs up Lionel’s realizations in his article, “Tourette's syndrome plagues Essrog but also privileges him: 'There were times,' he reflects, 'when I felt like a bolt of static electricity communing with figures that moved through a sea of molasses.' As a private eye, Essrog belongs to a lineage dating back to Sherlock Holmes and beyond, in which the detective is ultimately a damaged seer. For Holmes, the instrument of insight -- and debilitation -- was cocaine. For Essrog, it is supercharged brain cells and overloaded synapses. In his memoir, A Touretter's Tale (1998), Lowell Handler writes that 'Tourette's may be viewed as a special power or a disability, but never anything in between.' Today, Tourette's and other neurological conditions regularly appear in literature as special power and disability simultaneously” (Blume 2).

Blume takes examples from the novel and mentions that Tourette’s syndrome has a larger audience than it did in the past. If a film were to have a character like Lionel as the main character back in the time when In a Lonely Place was filmed, the movie may not have been received so easily. It is much rarer for a film to feature a main character with a neurological condition that is a super power and weakness at the same time. It is even more rare for an illness such as Tourette’s to be presented in such a light, as it is in Lethem’s novel. This is another example of Lethem’s novel challenging the old ideas of noir. Noir isn’t a genre to feature a main character with disabilities beyond psychosis, delirium, or just simple murderous tendencies. Noir usually doesn’t feature comedic moments either in film or in novel form. Lethem has taken his main character and made a verifiable clown out of him and his disease, while also properly representing him and showing the audience what it’s like to live with and suffer from Tourette’s. This novel pays homage to the classic hard-boiled detective tales and movies while standing on its own as a convincing and comedic whole,

“If literature can draw sustenance from neurology, so can literary criticism -- starting with Shakespeare himself. After all, Hamlet has been shamelessly dragged from psycho-analytic couch to psychoanalytic couch. But there is far better reason to declare of Caliban -- 'You taught me language; and my profit on't/Is, I know how to curse' -- that he was literature's first and greatest coprolaliac, progenitor to Lionel Essrog. Caliban, though, had plain and simple Tourette's. Our culture is showing signs of meta-Tourette's; like Essrog we scan the environment for neurological correspondences.” (Blume 3).

Lethem has created an almost antithesis to the “normal” idea of noir. He has applied his own unique trademark to a genre that has long been part of literature. He has created a genre entirely his own, part noir, part celebration of the human mind and how it can work even while afflicted by a debilitating disease.

In conclusion, Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem challenges the ideas of noir by featuring a main character who suffers from a serious mental illness. Lethem’s novel is often comedic and ironic. To meet the expectations predicated by the hard-boiled format, a writer must hit the right notes, such as bloody crimes, tense interrogations, bind alleys, etc. However, Lethem has written a specimen that meditates on language, neurology, and the mixture of the unusual and all too familiar. A detective should have his ducks in a row, however we more often than not see ourselves running our mouths with no filter between our tongues and our minds, just like Lionel. It makes one wonder how truly different Lionel is from a detective from New York. The truth is that he is no different. He merely has challenged the stereotype of a New York detective and made the definition something more than it was before.

Works Cited

Blume, Harvey. “NEURO-NARRATIVES.” American Prospect, vol. 11, no. 13, 5 May 2000, pp. 44–44.
Lethem, Jonathan. Motherless Brooklyn. Faber and Faber, 2014.
“What Is Tourette.” Tourette Association of America, tourette.org/about-tourette/overview/what-is-tourette/.