Motherless Brooklyn Study Guide

Jonathan Lethem was born in Brooklyn to parents who were artists and political activists. Lethem and his family lived in a commune in the neighborhood now known as Boerum Hill. Lethem’s early artistic influences include Bob Dylan, Star Wars, and the fiction of Philip K. Dick (The Man In the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Scanner Darkly). Lethem harbored artistic aspirations throughout high school and later enrolled as an undergraduate at Bennington College. Bennington was a liberal arts mecca, and there Lethem met writers like Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis who would later become his peers; the wealthy and secluded atmosphere at Bennington, however, also exposed Lethem for the first time to the harsh realities of class privilege. Lethem moved to California, where he began publishing short stories. His debut novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, was published in 1994. Lethem quickly earned a reputation as a skillful writer capable of merging literary fiction with genre sensibilities, incorporating science fiction, noir, post-apocalyptic fiction, and detective stories with ease. Lethem returned to Brooklyn, where he enjoyed continued success as a writer of “genre bending” novels such as Girl in Landscape and Motherless Brooklyn, which netted Lethem a National Book Critics Circle Award. Lethem was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 2005. The author of over 15 works of fiction and a frequent contributor to publications like Rolling Stone, Harper’s, and The New Yorker, Lethem has established himself as one of contemporary fiction’s most ambitious voices. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Motherless Brooklyn hearkens back to the noir detective stories of the 1940s and 1950s—but it is set in late-1990s Brooklyn. In deciding to give his novel a modern-day setting, Lethem is able to engage with wider intellectual, political, and social issues beyond the core mystery at the heart of the book. Lethem tells a story about Italian mobsters set in a time period well beyond the establishment of the RICO (or Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act—a federal law passed in 1970 which provides for criminal penalties for acts performed on behalf of a criminal organization. The criminal players in Motherless Brooklyn have long operated in the shadows and are driven by nostalgia for an idealized version of a world they’ve never known. In other words, Frank and Gerard Minna want to be bigshots—but unlike their midcentury forbears, who created vast criminal networks that often operated with relative impunity, the Minnas and their Men (Lionel, Tony, Danny, and Gilbert) struggle to get their enterprise off the ground. Additionally, the narrative focuses on a network of Japanese mobsters, or Yakuza, who disguise themselves as monks in order to illegally traffic valuable uni (sea urchin) eggs back to the lucrative Japanese market. This aspect of the plot has drawn criticism from critics such as Sheng-mei Ma, who believes that the novel’s undertones are emblematic of the “Japan-bashing” resulting from the “height of Japanese economic power” which took place in the mid-to-late 1990s.

Motherless Brooklyn is at once a work of detective fiction and a parody of noir—a genre of crime or mystery fiction with a dark, cynical, morally ambiguous bent. Hallmark noir novels include Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, and James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity and L.A. Confidential. The mystery at the heart of Motherless Brooklyn, which takes Lionel Essrog into dark enclaves of New York City, is a decidedly modern take on the noir genre, which itself has roots in the groundbreaking work in the mystery genre done by Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the infamous detective character Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie, who created two equally iconic detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Other more contemporary noir titles include Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, as well as Megan Abbott’s Die a Little. Like Motherless Brooklyn, Larsson and Abbott’s novels have been hailed as genre-bending books which seamlessly blend elements of detective fiction with an artistic or literary sensibility.