Lionel tells us the the story in first person, as he wanders around New York City and then coastal Maine looking for clues and doing his best to manage his disease. The plot is pretty simple: Gangster Frank Minna is murdered, and the four wise guys he's nurtured since orphan-hood (Tourrette's-afflicted Lionel Essrog being one of them) try to find out who killed him and why. Then, he sat down to write, and the book he produced (in 1999) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, turned out to be one of the most-read novels of the aughts, and is often cited as a favorite novel of all time. And his relationship with language is how I'll make him sympathetic. But he can't be a punchline, he has to be sympathetic. What if one of the characters has Tourette's Syndrome? Yeah, that'll add intrigue.

To explain why, let's try to follow (an absurdly abbreviated version of) what must've been Lethem's thought process before actually sitting down to write: 'What I want to write is a literary detective novel that pays tribute to the masters like Raymond Chandler. Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn is one of the best examples you'll ever find of this theory in action. In his treatise On Writing, Stephen King says the spark for many of the best novels is when a writer combines two or more disparate ideas/topics/themes and then figures out how they can complement each other in interesting or unexpected ways.

Motherless in brooklyn book