Motherless Brooklyn

⚖The case for it

Lionel Essrog has Tourette’s, and Lethem writes the tics as language rather than symptom: looping riffs on his own name and on whatever he just overheard, which readers compare to scat singing. It is “handled with aplomb, with sensitivity, with humor,” so you laugh with him. The mystery is scaffolding; what holds people is the found family of orphans raised into muscle by a small-time Brooklyn boss. One scene in a Japanese restaurant gets named by readers who otherwise have reservations. Readers call Lionel “one of the best characters I can ever remember encountering.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The device wears thin across a whole novel, and readers say plainly that “the Tourette’s stuff got old,” with one audiobook listener noting that “listening to 10 hours of Tourette’s is a bit much.” Underneath it the plot is stock: gangsters, a shadowy front, a tough cop, a late car chase, until “all the stereotypes are piled together in clichéd suffocation.” A critic finds “the plot disappears for a while somewhere around the middle” and calls the whole thing “hardly crackerjack detective material.” A late scene “turns Lionel into a cardboard character complete with a lame catchphrase.”

— the honest librarian

6h

honest hours

9

sittings