When Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn first appeared in 1999, critics hailed the novel as an homage to classic 1930s hard-boiled crime fiction. In his novel, Lethem bends the traditional elements of the genre, creating a detective story that is both an enthralling crime story and a clever parody of one. Wannabe detective Lionel Essrog, who has Tourette’s syndrome and is given to involuntary outbursts, relates the narrative in strings of often rhyming and obscene words that create a weird kind of poetry. When the death of his mentor—a smalltime hood who worked the streets of Brooklyn—upends his life, Lionel determines to track down the killers. The investigation leads him through a bewildering labyrinth of dead ends, double crosses, false leads, and red herrings. This guide references the 2000 Vintage Contemporary paperback edition. 

Motherless Brooklyn was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Gold Dagger, awarded annually in the UK for the best crime novel of the year. In 2019, 20 years after its publication, Motherless Brooklyn was released as a film directed by Oscar-nominated actor Edward Norton, who played Lionel Essrog. Although the movie generated modest critical enthusiasm, aficionados of the novel pointed to several significant alterations the movie took with the original storyline, most notably moving the era from the late 1990s to the 1950s and introducing an entirely new storyline about a Harlem activist and a corrupt city planner.

Plot Summary

Lionel Essrog, an orphan, grew up in a boys’ home in Brooklyn. Because of his odd speech habits and peculiar tics, such as touching people and even kissing them (he will not understand Tourette’s syndrome for some time), Lionel made few friends. Frank Minna, a charismatic hood who ran a moving service that fronted for a small-time detective agency, recruited Lionel, along with three other boys from the home, to serve as minions doing gofer jobs: surveillance, stakeouts, and client shadowing. The boys, dubbing themselves “Minna Men,” have worked for Frank for close to 20 years.

Now in his thirties, Lionel and the crew accompany Frank during a routine stakeout to a Zendo, a Zen meditation center in Upper East Side Manhattan. There, they are stunned to witness Frank, coming out of the center, suddenly snatched at knifepoint and forced into a waiting car. Lionel and the Minna Men pursue, but by the time they catch up to Frank’s kidnapper, Frank has been knifed and left for dead in a dumpster. On the way to the emergency room, Frank refuses to identify his assailants to Lionel. Frank dies that night. 

Distraught by the loss of his mentor, Lionel vows to find the killers. He has few clues and only knows that a giant of a man kidnapped Frank. He decides to begin by breaking the news to Julia, Frank’s now widow. He is surprised to find she already knows and is, in fact, packing a suitcase. Her answers are evasive, and when a city detective interrupts their visit, Julia refuses to answer his questions and departs. Lionel then turns to a pair of wiseguys, two old school Italian gangsters for whom Frank worked, but they offer little help. 

When Frank’s accountant comes up dead and one of the Minna Men is arrested for the crime, Lionel begins to suspect he knows little about the dimensions of Frank’s criminal enterprises. He decides to return to the Zendo. There he meets Kimmery, a mysterious girl with short black hair and glasses who works at the Zendo doing odd jobs. She introduces Lionel to Buddhism and the concept of the Zendo as a sanctuary, a place to find peace. When Lionel leaves the Zendo, unfamiliar men abruptly hustle him into a waiting car and caution him to stop visiting the Zendo. Left in their rental car, Lionel finds that the vehicle’s rental agreement lists the Fujisaki Corporation, which he has never heard of. 

As Lionel’s investigation leads him into a shadowy underworld over the next several days, he begins to question whom he can trust, including members of the Minna Men. During a return visit to the Zendo, Lionel finally sees the mysterious giant he believes responsible for Frank’s death, only to discover he is employed by the Zendo’s master teacher, none other than Frank’s own brother, Gerard. 

In quick order, Lionel pursues a lead to a Buddhist retreat center in coastal southern Maine. There he pieces together Frank’s story. Years earlier, Frank and his brother had attempted to swindle the Brooklyn mobsters, who decided to have both brothers whacked. While Gerard turned to the refuge of Buddhism as a survival strategy, Frank turned to the love of the tempestuous Julia. When the brothers returned to Brooklyn, Gerard became entangled with a powerful Japanese corporation bent on developing deep, illegal ties to American businesses. When the brothers ran afoul of the corporation, Gerard, desperate to save himself, arranged for the murder of his own brother. In the end, Gerard disappears and is presumed killed. The novel closes with Lionel, alone, gifted now with a haunting awareness of the world’s fathomless amorality.