Masculinity, Father Figures, and Mentorship Theme Analysis

Though Lionel Essrog is a member of “Motherless Brooklyn”—the nickname that Frank Minna’s brother Gerard gives to the group of orphans whom Frank takes under his wing during their youth—as the novel unfolds, Lethem focuses more on what it means to be fatherless than what it means to be motherless. Without any concept of a “father” apart from Frank, Lionel and his fellow Minna Men—Tony, Danny, and Gilbert—strive to figure out what it truly means to be a man as they grow up straining toward a vision of masculinity inspired solely by Frank, who’s their fair-weather father figure. Though the title of the novel focuses on the orphans being motherless, Lethem ultimately argues that for young men, fatherlessness and the absence of a steadfast model of masculinity is the more pressing concern—and the factor that may ultimately shape how they find themselves embodying (or failing to embody) a masculine identity.

Early on in the novel, Lethem interrogates the concept of masculinity at which Lionel has arrived through his relationship with Frank—and what that concept means for how Lionel moves through the world. Lionel begins the novel’s second chapter with the following list of the Minna Men’s characteristics: “Minna Men wear suits. Minna Men drive cars. Minna Men listen to tapped lines. Minna Men stand behind Minna hands in their pockets, looking menacing. Minna Men carry money. Minna Men collect money. Minna Men don't ask questions. Minna Men answer phones. Minna Men pick up packages. Minna Men are clean-shaven. Minna Men follow instructions. Minna Men try to be like Minna but Minna is dead.” The rest of the chapter delves into Lionel’s past and explores how he came to be a Minna man. Many years ago, Lionel explains, Frank Minna—then a two-bit hood working odd jobs for a pair of Italian gangsters known only to Frank’s orphan lackeys as The Clients—plucked Lionel, Danny, Tony, and Gilbert from an orphanage for boys in downtown Brooklyn. Over the years, Frank molded the young boys into “Minna Men”: a tiny but dedicated army of motherless (and fatherless) boys desperate to impress their idol, Frank. Now, Lionel has a narrow and highly specific idea of what it means to be a Minna man. But as he points out at the end of this passage, “Minna is dead,” and Lionel and his fellow Men will have to begin discovering what manhood means independent of Frank’s quirks, instructions, and defining habits. “In our dreams we Minna Men were all Frank Minna,” Lionel goes on to say, demonstrating that in the absence of a true father, his and his fellow Men’s ideas of masculine identity have been entirely shaped around Minna’s vision of masculinity.

As the novel progresses, Lionel reckons more deeply with how the image of masculinity he learned to emulate as a result of his idolatry of Frank is, in many ways, false and insufficient. Lionel is first presented with an alternate mode of masculinity during his investigations into the shady goings-on at the Yorkville Zendo (a Buddhist house of worship)—the site of the stakeout-gone-wrong on the night of Frank’s murder. When Lionel attends a lecture at the Zendo in order to gather more information on a group of important visiting monks, Lionel notices the “six bald Japanese men[’s] […] robes revealing glimpses of sagging brown skin and threads of white underarm hair.” These important monks embody a very different image of masculinity which nonetheless intersects, in a few ways, with the Minna Men’s internalized notions of what it is to be a man. Like Minna Men, the monks are quiet and keen to follow instructions—but unlike the buttoned-up Minna Men who always wear suits, the monks embody a more lax and vulnerable masculine affect. Even later in the novel, Lionel follows Frank Minna’s widow, Julia, up to Maine—where there is another Zendo connected to the Yorkville institution. At a restaurant specializing in Japanese and Thai cuisine, Lionel finds Julia working as a waitress—and once again encounters the monks but finds that this time, they’re dressed to the nines in fine suits. The monks are the shareholders of the shadowy and powerful Fujisaki corporation, the entity which funnels money through the Zendos to support their illegal trade in valuable uni (sea urchin) eggs harvested off the coast of Maine. “They were all we could never be no matter how Minna pushed us: absolutely a team, a unit, their presence collective like a floating island of charisma and force,” Lionel observes of the monks. He feels the men are “the image the Minna Men had always strained toward but had never reached and never would reach.” When Lionel first encountered the Fujisaki men dressed as monks, he found their image of masculinity alien and even slightly repulsive—now, however, as he sees the men take on a more traditionally masculine guise, he finds himself full of envy and sadness. The vision of masculinity that Lionel has been chasing all his life—instilled within him by his mentor and father figure, Frank Minna—has felt effortful to attain and even more difficult to maintain, requiring a strict set of rules and behaviors in order to approximate. Seeing the effortless ways in which a real community of men embody a shared sense of masculinity rather than one impressed upon them by a single entity reveals to Lionel the ways in which his ideas of masculinity have been malformed through Minna’s influence. Ultimately, Lethem suggests that to be decentered from a healthy, fluid, collective sense of the masculine, as the Minna Men tragically are, is to spend one’s life struggling—and failing—to find a mode of masculinity that creates a sense of authentic, intimate brotherhood.