Short Reviews

Motherless Brooklyn
by Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday, $23.95)
Get in touch with your inner freak and he will set you free. That's the message of Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem's fifth novel in as many years. The narrator, Lionel, is as freakish as they come. He sputters obscenities, strokes strangers' shoulders, and obsessively taps doors and tabletops. His habits aren't willfully weird, but the result of Tourette's syndrome, the brain disorder that causes uncontrollable mental, verbal, and physical tics. This is fertile ground for the language-loving author, who twists the plainest dialogue into unexpected, nonsensical, sometimes obscene mantras running unbidden through Lionel's brain.

Growing up in a Brooklyn orphanage in the early '70s, Lionel is just another outcast acting out. His ailment remains undiagnosed until low-level wise guy Frank Minna passes along a book called Understanding Tourette's Syndrome. The charismatic, pompadoured hood shows up at St. Vincent's Home for Boys looking for able-bodied laborers. He ends up with Lionel, whom he affectionately nicknames "The Human Freakshow," and three of his schoolmates: chubby, not-too-bright Gilbert; proud, bullying Tony; and handsome, laconic Danny.

Over the next 20 years, the boys grow into "Minna Men." They dress like Frank, talk like Frank, and do Frank's bidding. Under cover of a storefront car service (whose standard phone greeting is "No cars") they run what they call a detective agency. They deliver packages, follow people, stake out buildings, and smoke a lot of cigarettes. Frank never reveals what these errands have to do with his "investigations." Then one day he winds up stabbed and dumped in a rubbish bin. The Minna Men finally have a real case.

Lionel throws himself into the hunt for Frank's killer. His Tourette's becomes a Trojan horse, masking his perceptive mind with a compulsive, kooky exterior so he can wander unheeded in enemy territory. Though his addled brain has always seen conspiracy in the smallest coincidences— "wheels within wheels," as Minna sarcastically puts it—Lionel discovers that he barely imagined the real web of unspoken rules and alliances that entangled his dead mentor.

Lethem excels at this kind of absurdist detective yarn, as he proved with his debut, the Chandleresque sci-fi novel Gun, With Occasional Music. Like any good fiction, however, Motherless Brooklyn transcends genre. Modern-day New York may be a big change from the post-apocalyptic and interplanetary settings of his previous work (Girl in Landscape, Amnesia Moon) but Lethem creates such compelling characters, it doesn't matter whether they're prowling through brownstones or another solar system. Yet these Brooklyn streets have their own surrealistic sheen; amid the neighborhood stoop-sitters lurk kumquat-gobbling giants and Japanese gangster-Buddhists. In Lethem's weird, brutal, and sometimes glorious world, everyone's a freak—some are just better at hiding it.

Jackie McCarthy

Slapboxing With Jesus
by Victor D. LaValle (Vintage, $11)
Even though short story collections are again gaining currency in the book world, LaValle's stands out by its refusal to play by the rules. His stories narrate the life of a boy growing up in New York's less glamorous boroughs, Queens and the Bronx, and they are tough and surprising by turns. His narrators live in a limbo of cognitive dissonance between their articulate minds and the language of the streets. Often, they know more than they say and keep the knowledge to themselves despite the results: heartbreak, violence, near- insanity, and, ultimately, denial. "ghost story" reveals the narrator's instability delicately, by degrees, and the final unveiling is as stark and ugly as the real world after a particularly nice dream. Rob, the young prostitute of "slave," works hard not to know the kind of world he has created for himself. No doubt LaValle will be compared to Junot Diaz, and perhaps accused of covering similar ground, as if one book or one writer could account for a whole culture's experience. Not every story is a high point, but LaValle's strength is his control of language, which roves easily from the street to the odd world of the mind: "I kept turning my head," the narrator of "ghost story" says, "the sounds bounced around my body, leafing through my bastard anatomy like I was a book of poems."

Emily Hall

Dreaming Under a Ton of Lizards
by Marian Michener (Spinsters Ink, $12)
Marian Michener's debut work of fiction, a mere 139 pages, just barely escaped categorization as a novella. Although the book mainly concerns itself with the universal subject of self-realization, the sexuality and struggles with alcohol of Olivia, the troubled protagonist, assure this novel a quick passage to the far corner of Barnes & Noble. Moreover, the plot sounds like an echo of books already written: Olivia flees her alcoholic girlfriend Brooke to seek solace in an isolated writer's life on the Oregon Coast. After numerous alcohol-soaked thoughts about her childhood crush, Judith, and repeated dreams haunted by Sister Wine, Olivia heads south to San Francisco, hot on the heels of her ex-lover. Following repeated memories of her alcoholic husband Malcolm, a falling out with still-drunk Brooke, and a new friendship with the clean and sober Kathleen, Olivia braves the long, hard road to sobriety and self-knowledge. What distinguishes this novel and makes it somewhat reminiscent of Dorothy Allison's Trash is its prose. The writing behind Olivia's first-person narrative recognizes the raw spots and sharp corners of life and interprets them, thus enabling Olivia to survive through sheer imagination. Dogs approach Olivia "like a velvet tide"; a woman laughs "like she had broken glass in her throat." Just as concentrating on the fundamental detail of breathing helps pull Olivia away from alcoholism, so do the nuances of Michener's language save this book from mediocrity.