ZapTown

Happy Valentine’s Day! Another column this week–in my ongoing drive to be more productive here at Zaptown. No, I didn’t get all the way through Under The Dome yet, but I’m at the midway point. That counts for something, right?

In the meantime, I’m working my way through other novels. And what I find is that it’s always refreshing to pick up a book by a writer you’ve never read, but who often seems to be mentioned in glowingly positive terms, and find yourself enjoying the story they’ve put together. More than that, to find the book not quite like anything else you’ve read before, here in an age where libraries can be downloaded in an afternoon, could be construed as a minor (and very entertaining) miracle. At the same time, it’s strangely bittersweet, and once you start enjoying the book, you find yourself muttering (perhaps in a voice that’s supposed to be the book’s) ‘what took you so long, dummy?’

This was the case with Motherless Brooklyn, an award-winning, and much-acclaimed novel published in 1999 that I’ve heard mentioned a fair bit over the years, but never got around to reading, possibly because author Jonathan Lethem seems to be one of those sorts that everyone agrees is really good. (For example, I’ve had the same problem with Michael Chabon–everyone I read or talked to seem to agree how great he was, so I, in my counter-intuitive way, decided because everyone already liked his stuff, I’d avoid it and try to read something different, until I picked up The Yiddish Policeman’s Union a year and a half ago or so, and was bowled over. The moral of this story is that I can be a bit slow to recognize a good thing, sometimes.)

Anyhow, yes, apparently after reading Motherless Brooklyn, the reason why everybody says good things about Jonathan Lethem’s writing is that his writing is terrific! The narrative is a detective story, of sorts. Specifically the sort that is a murder mystery, with a first-person narrator who many of the characters (and the reader) manage to underestimate throughout the tale, and who doles out information about his life in New York City as the story progresses, gradually widening our understanding about what’s happening. The important thing here is that Lethem plays fair-he doesn’t cheat. Everything, by the last chapter, makes sense in the good way. The way where you want to go back and read the book again, this time with the knowledge of what’s actually going on. I’m not sure if Lethem has written other mysteries, or if his other novels have different focuses, but if he wanted to, he could clearly do an excellent series of detective books. I’d read them. And that’s the second point here. Not only does Lethem have that gift of playing fair–constructing a plot that’s full of well-earned surprises that seem natural at the time, but make sense in hindsight, he makes it entertaining. His descriptions are vivid, and just half-cocked enough to keep the book feeling a bit breezier than it might otherwise be. And his narrator/protagonist, the tourettes-afflicted orphan Lionel Essrog, a large, hulking man who’s investigating the murder of his patron Frank Minna, is a vivid, fully-realized character, whose inner conflicts (his melancholy recollection of trying to own a cat, for instance) are the cherry on the sundae of the novel. At just over three hundred pages, Motherless Brooklyn never really slows down to catch its breath. Now that I’ve read it, I have two main conclusions: One is understanding what all those people were talking about when they said nice things about Jonathan Lethem’s writing, all those years. The second is kicking myself for taking so long to pick up one of his books.