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"Motherless Brooklyn"
An author comes up with a new (and brilliant) twist for the detective novel: A narrator with Tourette's syndrome.
By Gary Krist
[09/23/99]

Reviews
"The Abyssinian"
A prize-winning French novel turns out to be a mound of merde.
By Brigitte Frase
[09/22/99]

Ivory Tower
Capitalism and cosmos
The new economy marches on, its front lines manned with recruits from the nation's top business schools -- elite training camps for the capitalist army.
By Matt T. Stover
[09/22/99]

An honorable murderer?
The legendary defense attorney Alan Dershowitz talks about the justice of revenge, the success of genocide and his new ethical thriller.
By Nan Goldberg
[09/21/99]

Dear Mr. Blue
Raging bull
I've grown weary of my husband's sudden fits of anger. What can I do to help?
By Garrison Keillor
[09/21/99]

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Mother and daughter worked together, dressing the two young boys, tucking them into their outfits. The boys slithered under their hands, delighted, impatient, eyes darting sideways. They nearly groaned with momentary pleasure. The four were going to the beach, so their bodies had to be sealed against the sun. The boys had never been there. The girl had, just once. She could barely remember.

Since I first read those sentences, I have loaned or given copies of "Girl" to my little sister, my boss, a famous writer I admire, several colleagues, two foreign visitors and many friends. Most of them had never heard of Lethem for the same reason that you probably haven't -- not because he hasn't written much (Lethem has written five novels and one book of stories) but because until now he has written only science fiction and, by and large, science fiction doesn't get reviewed in the mainstream press. That will probably change with Lethem's new novel, "Motherless Brooklyn," a book that looks likely to complete his long, gradual crossover to full literary respectability.

Also Today "Motherless Brooklyn" An author comes up with a new (and brilliant) twist for the detective novel: A narrator with Tourette's syndrome. By Gary Krist

I use the term "science fiction" loosely. It may be more accurate to say that Lethem is a genre writer, and a versatile one at that: He has written a western, a noir, a Philip Dick-style dystopic fantasy and an academic satire -- in other words, novels that obey conventions different from those of literary realism. Traditionally, the essential feature of science fiction -- that it unfolds in the future -- has seemed to give it prophetic powers, and the highest praise that we can give to a certain kind of science-fiction writer is that he or she got the future right. In Lethem's work, however, the futuristic setting functions like the words "once upon a time ..." It prepares us to enter the realm of myth, without telling us which myth, in particular, to expect.

Because "Motherless Brooklyn" is set in the present and recent past, and so is likely to end Lethem's cult status, now seems the time to set down some notes on the style of his early work, and the departure that "Motherless Brooklyn" represents. "Girl in Landscape," the western, shows Lethem's science fiction at its best. Lethem, who is his own most illuminating critic (and tends to talk about his novels as if they came out of a chemistry set), describes "Girl" as a mixture of the John Ford movies "The Searchers" and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." He admits that it "also owes scenes and dialogue to my favorite E.M. Forster novel, 'A Passage to India.'"

The premise is this: In the future, ozone depletion forces earthlings underground. An idealistic Brooklyn politician, widowed when his wife dies from exposure to solar radiation and -- disgraced by collapses of the subway tunnels in which New Yorkers now live -- resettles with his teenage daughter and little sons on what is called the Planet of the Archbuilders. There he hopes to build a liberal society in harmony with the indigenous people, but he soon runs afoul of the colony's de facto leader, a charismatic bigot who nonetheless seems to understand and fear the Archbuilders more deeply than the other humans do.

The story, which we watch unfold through the daughter's eyes, could hardly be more familiar, but everywhere Lethem unearths complications. We know (without being told) to read the strongman as John Wayne and the father as Jimmy Stewart; Lethem lets us imagine them talking and moving in bodies like the bodies of those actors. At the same time, he shows us the fertile ambiguity of their roles. If the father has a guilty past, if the strongman takes the place of the missing mother, if the western is also a novel of sexual awakening and if the novel of sexual awakening emanates a dreamlike flora and fauna of its own, none of this feels like pastiche, or parody, even when it makes you laugh. Lethem makes it seem organic to the genre.

For this reason, it's easy to say what Lethem's science fiction is about and wonderfully hard to say what it means. Take the Archbuilders, a hermaphroditic, ancient race haunted by the accomplishments of their ancestors and in love with the "'enchanting limitations'" of the English language. What do they stand for? Indians, of course. But Indians as sexual threats, as childlike originals, as belated poets, as unknowable mysteries, as victims, as Hindus, as Anglo-Saxons in the shadow of Roman ruins? What do Indians stand for?

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