Motherless Brooklyn

⚖The case for it

You will notice fast that the voice is the whole show and the mystery runs thin. Detective fiction was always a voice delivery system first: Chandler endures on Marlowe's sentences, not on plots even Chandler couldn't untangle, so Lethem isn't cheating the form, he is confessing what it always ran on. And Lionel Essrog's Tourette's is no costume draped over a stock gumshoe. The compulsion to touch, to count, to correct each stray word until it sits right is the detective's hunger, the need to force a disordered world into order. The tic and the vocation are one appetite, and watching them fuse earns the shelf space.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Subtract Lionel's Tourette's and you are left with a fairly ordinary detective story, which is the problem: the voice is the book. The actual mystery resolves through a muddle that even Lionel barely seems to follow. Lethem bet everything on the tic, and the plot got the leftovers.

— the honest librarian