Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

“Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I’m a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I’ve got Tourette’s. 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.)”


The opening lines of Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem.

The opening section of the novel runs on in this breathless fashion for about a page, enacting the compulsive articulation that it describes and that characterizes the narrator, the Tourette’s-afflicted Lionel Essrog. Most of the novel is narrated in a straightforward first-person style, but it is bracketed, and occasionally punctuated, by these passages of direct address to the reader. The switch between the two modes is perhaps nowhere so pleasurably jarring as at the end of this opening section. Lethem spends a page making us feel the internal buildup of pressure that results in one of Lionel’s explosive exclamations; then when it comes, it is followed by a section break and we are immediately plunged into the familiar territory of private investigator novels, with Lionel and his partner on a stakeout. The fact that the partner responds casually to the outburst that climaxed the opening section neatly bridges the two.

Lionel’s initial presentation of his condition aligns neatly with the form of the novel in which he appears, a detective story: both are concerned with sense-making. Lionel asserts that behavior is understood, or becomes understandable, in context, and he offers a series of roles or situations in which his compulsive verbal ticcing would require no particular explanation. Likewise, the detective in a novel solves a crime by understanding the context in which it occurred: what were the histories and relationships of victim and suspects, what circumstances influenced their behavior, who benefited from the crime.

On the other hand, Lionel exhibits a degree of passivity somewhat odd for a detective, one that has perhaps been shaped by his experience of living with Tourette’s. He does not insert himself into the different contexts he conjures but rather invites the reader to dress him up. When he says that his mouth won’t quit, the implication that it has a degree of agency over which he has no control is not figure of speech but an accurate portrayal of his experience. Even when he casts himself in a famous detective comic strip, his role is forced on him by his condition.

The shock that opens the novel and sets the story in motion, however, is enough to jolt Lionel from his passivity and force him to assume the active stance of the investigator. And for the rest of the book, his Tourette’s-informed worldview becomes as much of a resource as a handicap.

Atlantis: Three Tales by Samuel R. Delany

I. Skyscrapers—that’s what he was most eager to see. But before entering the city the train dropped between earthen walls tangled with winter trees, sometimes becoming out the window, for a hundred feet or more, concrete.

II. The tallest building in the world was in New York—the Woolworth Building. Most people knew that; but he knew, counting basements and sub-basements, the Woolworth had exactly sixty stories—and not many people knew that.

III. Bring such information out at the right time, and people said: “What a smart boy!” which made up a little for the guilt he felt over his school grades: they’d been bad enough to silence Papa—

IV. recently elected bishop—and make Mama cry. Finally they’d decided to let him leave (clearly school was doing him no good) and come north to stay with his brother. Sam’s toes felt sticky in his socks.

V. Last night, he’d decided not to take his shoes off, afraid his feet might smell. This morning, however, though he’d already gone into the little bathroom with its metal walls to wash his face and hands,

VI. nothing about him felt fresh. Stretching, he arched his back, pulled his fists against his chest; the noblet of flesh on the left side—one male, milkless teat—caught a thread or fold in his shirt,

pulling till it cut.

The opening lines, but for the epigraphs, of “Atlantis: Model 1924” by Samuel R. Delany (found in the collection Atlantis: Three Tales). One of my favorite stories by one of my favorite writers. (And really, one should not disregard the epigraphs in Delany, even though I have done so here.)

I confess I have never understood the rationale for numbering the initial bits of text. It used to put me in mind of those philosophical works where each paragraph is individually numbered.

But these aren’t separate paragraphs; indeed, this text would seem to constitute a single paragraph if the numbers were removed. The first two seem more or less self-contained; that is, they start and end with the beginnings and ends of sentences. But any sense of internal unity seems to break down as the sections progress. While the first section stands alone fairly readily, the thought of the second continues straight on into the third, which in turn ends without completing its sentence. In the fourth, the turn from Sam’s parents to his toes seems rather abrupt, though the thought thus introduced then continues on not just into the next section, but even beyond to the last. And then that lovely phrase “pulling till it cut” abruptly cuts the numbered sequence altogether and signals the start of a more straightforward form of narrative (though it won’t last).

The numbering does finally reappear at the end of the story, a single section VII that encompasses a portion, though neither the beginning nor the end, of the story’s lyrical last sentence.

But even as all that is going on, the numbering and the broken sentences and all those dashes, what a terrific bit of prose it is, what an economical bit of storytelling. In this brief section, Delany has established the situation of the story: a young man from the country arriving for the first time in the city; he’s suggested a historical time frame: prior to the construction of the Empire State Building (reinforcing the “1924” of the title); he’s sketched the family dynamics that have produced this situation; he has manifested the physicality of his character; and he has conveyed that immature mixture of excitement and uncertainty and growing worldliness that will make Sam so interesting.

I’m insistent on its status as terrific prose because I’ve now decided that the numbering and the dashes, etc. suggest that the section is also a form of poetry. Those sections are stanzas. It’s formal poetry, too: each stanza is thirty-six words, something I’d never realized until I sat down to copy them out. And if that’s the case, they do serve to establish a lyricism that seems to me characteristic of the story as a whole; they suggest an experience that is both mundane and heightened.