Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

Imagine that whenever you begin a sentence--jackaphone, dirtyworker, dirketyname—you are suddenly compelled—luddenly compulsed—to throw in strings of nonsense—nun of strings--and unable to do resist the temptation, no matter the effect on those around you. That is, try to imagine the world of person who has Tourette’s syndrome. Imagine further trying to write a novel through the eyes of a character whose Torettic impulses vibrate and pulse through every page. Among other things, this is the accomplishment of Jonathan Lethem in his wonderfully twisted little mystery novel entitled, Motherless Brooklyn.

This is a book I probably would have missed save for the keen eyes of a reader friend of mine, Robert Mercer, who is also the head of advising for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Portland State University. Although I tend to avoid both mysteries and best-sellers, I’m so glad that I, once again, took Robert’s advice and read this book. I suppose it is a mystery, and that at least a part of its popularity has to do with unraveling the plot, but I see this much more as a book about what it means to be poor and abandoned in the big cities of the world, made worse, of course, if one is viewed as a freak.

This is really a book about four boys, all orphans, thrown together in a Catholic orphanage in Brooklyn. Their savior, or at any rate the person who finds some use for them, is a small-time hood and hustler who realizes the value of cheap labor that can be manipulated, trained to take orders, and not to ask questions. Frank Minna makes some sort of bargain with the priest who heads up the orphanage and takes four young teenage boys out of captivity for a day; they shuffle boxes from one truck to another, or from truck to warehouse, happy to be outside and at work. At the end of the day, each boy gets a $20 dollar bill and a few beers, probably their first beers and their first earned cash, and a quick-talking lesson from Frank Minna about the streets, about New York, about life. And this begins a series of such days, of unexplained errands, always ending with the beers and the cash and punctuated by the cynical teaching from the boss. Over the years, the jobs change some, the pay increases some, until all ‘graduate’ from the orphanage and become full-fledged Minna-men. The moving company has evolved into a private car-service, which is itself a front for a sleazy detective agency, and that again a front for something darker and more dangerous, though the Minna-men know next to nothing about who hires them or what they really are about.

There must be millions of stories not unlike this one—children of big cities, discarded, abandoned, and ‘saved’ by some false god who manages to fashion them in his image, to use them, sell them, put them in harm’s way. In this case, the boys repay their savior, their only father-figure, with loyalty and clumsy, sweetly pathetic attempts to emulate their surrogate-father.

I was not surprised to see in the acknowledgements a thanks to Dr. Oliver Sacks, who talks with such wonderfully sympathetic understanding of Tourette’s in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. Nor was I surprised to read the long list of names either of people who have Tourette’s or their families or others who have studied the effects of this strange disease. Jonathan Lethem obviously knows Tourettes from up close, so close that I found myself convinced the he must be Tourettic himself. He also understands poverty and the vulnerability of the poor. And yet this is not a depressing book. Indeed, it is often funny and heartwarming, and even the mystery component of it is quite good, pulling the reader along, entertaining while edifying.

The reader discovers not many pages into this book that the Father, the Boss, the Savior, Frank Minna, has been murdered, and now the Minna Men are on their own, left not only to fend for themselves (as they never have since their orphanage days), but to try to find the killer, unravel the mystery of his death. And although they worked for him, Frank has kept them wrapped in ignorance, unaware of the significance of their own actions, and consequently unaware of the dangers that now shadow them as they play detective. Let the main character, Lionel Essrog, speak for himself for a moment in the clever, cubistic style Lethem adopts for this book.

See me now, at one in the morning, stepping out of another cab in front of the Zendo, checking the street for cars that might have followed, for giveaway cigarette-tip glows through the windows of the cars parked on the deadened street, moving with my hands in my jacket pockets clutching might-be-guns-for-all-they-know, collar up against the cold like Minna, unshaven like Minna now, too, shoes clacking on sidewalk: think of a coloring-book image of the Green Hornet, say. That’s who I was supposed to be, that black outline of a man in a coat, ready suspicious eyes above his collar, shoulders hunched, moving toward conflict.

Here’s who I was instead: that same coloring-book outline of a man, but crayoned by the hand of a mad or carefree or retarded child, wild slashes of idiot color, a blizzard of marks violating the boundaries that made man distinct from street, from world. Some of those colors were my fresh images of Kimmery, flashing me back to the West Side an hour before, crayon stripes and arrows like flares over Central Park in the night sky. Others weren’t so pretty, roaring scrawls of mania, find-a-man-kill-a-phone-fuck-a-plan in sloppy ten-foot-high letters drawn like lightning bolts or Hot Wheels race-car flames through the space of my head. And the blackened steel-wool scribble of my guilt-deranged investigation: I pictured the voices of the two Minna brothers and Tony Vermonte and The Clients as gnarled above and around me, in a web of betrayal I had to penetrate and dissolve, an ostensible world I’d just discovered was really only a private cloud I carried everywhere, had never seen the outside of. So, crossing the street to the door of Zendo, I might have appeared less a single Green Hornet than a whole inflamed nest of them.

This is not a book I expected to enjoy, although in the first twenty pages of frenetic, Tourettic speech, I was hooked. I thought I was hooked simply by the irony of a Tourettic detective, by the cleverness of the author creating his lead character, but the deeper into the book I got, the more a world was being disclosed to me, a world of orphan loyalty, of street goodness, of corporate greed and ruthlessness. It turned out to be a book well worth reading, its lessons delivered in a mellifluous, Tourettic cadence by a character as wise as Philip Marlowe and certainly more loveable.

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman

I’m certain all of us have heard much about the therapeutic and cleansing powers of confession. This morning I want to make my confession to you and to pass along as well Anne Fadiman’s, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. Ms. Fadiman and I share what she calls a carnal love of books, as opposed to the courtly love so often prescribed by librarians and anxious bibliophiles. To the courtly lover,

A book's physical self was sacrosanct, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was a Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller. The Fadiman family believed in carnal love. To us a books words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.

Ah, what music to this reader who only knows if a book has been read by checking for underlining and marginalia; if there are no marks, I can be sure I haven’t read the book. I have always hidden behind the excuse of being a teacher, an unmarked book is useless when attempting to teach the content of a book to others. Anne Fadiman encourages me to leave the closet, to admit that I mark up mysteries and first editions, children’s books and, dare I say it, even the occasional library book (though restraining myself to the faintest marks in #2 pencil, meaning always to erase at journey’s end). I loved hearing Sylvia Ashton Warner’s description of the word cards she made up for her Maori children, the cards dirty and worn from passionate use. She knew that the word-cards that were not mangled were not being used, and she quickly withdrew those cards from circulation. So too with my books and Fadiaman’s; she quotes a friend who confesses to her that when he found Boswell’s journals, he “sucked them like a giant mongoose. I didn’t give a damn about the condition of those volumes. In order to get where I had to go, I underlined them, wrote in them, shredded them, dropped them, tore them to pieces, and did things to them that we can’t discuss in public.” My students laugh and offer to pony up the money for a new copy when I bring my old tattered copy of Nietzsche’s Will To Power to class, remove the rubber bands that keep it together, and sort through the pieces searching for important passages. Little do they know how valueless a new copy would be, naked and innocent and needing to be marked all over again. In even worse shape is my Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, and so many other volumes that have been literally loved to pieces.

The essays in this little volume of Fadiman’s could each be read on its own, just a chapter a night for the busy city-reader. And each chapter is bound to stir the passions of reading addicts who will know that they have found a kindred spirit. She confesses that she and her husband had known each other for ten years, lived together for six, and been married for five before they could finally bring themselves to merge their libraries. “We were both writers, and we both invested in our books the kind of emotion most people reserve for their old love letters. Sharing a bed and a future was a child’s play compared to sharing my copy of The Complete Poems of W.B. Yeats.” Finally, when his books became her books, she knew they were really married.

I have confessed before that when I am asked by others what I DO, my response, almost invariably is to say, “I read.” The conversation that follows is almost always worth the confusion and/or disbelief that my response initially engenders. The only time that I really envy a writer, really wish I had written the words, is when those words are about reading. Lynne Sharon Schwartz’ Ruined By Reading, Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, these are books I wish I could have written. Fadiman tells us that her parents had a library of 7,000 books, and I feel less guilty about my inability to get rid of books. I remember the near incredulity of my partner when I announced at retirement that I intended to bring home my entire office library, crowding them somehow into the downsized house we had moved into, one wall of which had already been knocked out to increase the size of my study and, more importantly, to provide more wall space for bookshelves. Now that my teaching career was winding down, she pleaded, did I really think I would need all these books? Would I really be teaching Kant or Sartre again, would I need to research Homer or Heraclitus? And how about all those science fiction books, not to mention the mysteries ignominiously housed in the garage. But who knows when my nephews and nieces might need these books? Who knows when I will need to finger them, read over forgotten titles once more, take down a Jane Austin or Thomas Hardy? Fadiman tells us that parents of her daughter’s second grade classmates sometimes complain to her that their children don’t read for pleasure.

When I visit their homes, the children’s rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parents’ rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says PRIVATE—GROWNUPS KEEP OUT; a child sprawled on the bed, reading.

Fadiman insists that she and her brother, also an avid reader, an addict for those who insist on naming the condition, discovered the unknown selves of their parents by perusing the shelves of books in their house. “Their selves were on their shelves.” And not only their present being-parents selves, but the selves they had occupied long before they had married or had children. While her father seemed not to have changed that much from when he first began collecting books in the ‘20s (a person who boasted that he had never done anything except think), she discovered an exotic and unknown mother who had once lived a life of action and travel. “And why had she stopped? Because she had had children. Her books, which seemed the property of a woman I had never met, defined the size of the sacrifice my brother and I had exacted.”

I remember the shock I felt some years ago when a loved colleague died and some few weeks after his death I found many of his books scattered through the vast piles at Powell’s Books. It seemed somehow so sad, so out of context, to scan his marginalia, knowing that never again would his terse comments on Heidegger occupy the same shelf as his wise overviews on Wittgenstein. Fadiman quotes a student who works in a bookstore and has the task of packing up the library of a deceased historian whom he had heard lecture.

Dispersing his library was like cremating a body and scattering it to the winds. I felt very sad. And I realized that books get their value from the way they coexist with the other books a person owns, and that when they lose their context, they lose their meaning.

Okay, so I confess, I mean to keep my hodge-podge library together, to dump it finally on a niece who is a fellow reader, a fellow addict. I love books; sometimes I feel that, like Fadiman’s young son, I could eat them. And if you are the sort who likes to devour books and who is willing to confess to book worship, you will love Anne Fadiman.

While I Was Gone by Sue Miller

I want to talk to you this morning about a book by Sue Miller entitled While I Was Gone. I happened on to Miller quite a few years ago when she wrote her first novel, The Good Mother. Although very impressed at the time, a not very good movie version of that book had the effect, I think, of causing to me to rethink how good the book had been. I wonder how often bad movies affect us in this way? My recollection is that the movie version distorted or made ambiguous a moral message in Miller's book, a message involved in worrying over a very delicate and complex issue.

At any rate, I think While I Was Gone is such a good and wise book that I mean to go back to the first novel again. I won't be telling you much about the plot in saying that a major existential theme arises in a number of ways in this book. Suppose you wake up one morning (or more realistically, morning after morning) feeling that you are the person you set out to be, the person others expect you to be, but that this 'success' is not only unsatisfying, but feels false. You know in some deep sense that you don't want to be that person. Perhaps it is only a person you thought you wanted to be. Perhaps even one that the they-self said you should be. No matter, however it has come to pass, there is this sense both of falseness and of wanting to be someone else. Not at all an easy matter when those around you admire you, and expect you to be the person they have come to admire. Change is always difficult, but so much more difficult when surrounded by people who think they know just who you are, and in many ways refuse to allow you to be the new self you feel emerging. Add a good but not very interesting marriage, which only compounds the feeling of falseness-not knowing who you want to be, but quite sure it is not the person you have become.

What Jo, the woman lead-character in this book does is run. The escape takes a few steps; first, she quits her hard-won teaching job. Step two is taking the first part-time, meaningless job she can find as a waitress in a seedy bar, surprised to find how attracted she is to the life that she finds there. “The attraction was that none of the rules from my old world applied. With everything I saw, everything I did, I felt that doors were opening. My life had been so orderly, such a careful, responsible progression, one polite step leading logically to the next. In this crummy, second-rate world, I had a sense of liberation, of possibility, and I embraced even its most tawdry aspects.” And if just that much change makes her feel so much better, so much more on the right track, the next step is obvious. Telling one lie to her husband and another to her mother, she simply disappears. And when she reappears in Cambridge, Mass. she changes her name (ironically to Felicia), and moves into a kind of city commune. The year is 1968, and what awaits her is, indeed, a new life, a new identity. In the frenetic freedom of those times, she is reborn.

Of course many of us were 'finding' ourselves in the sixties and seventies, and usually without quite the great escape performed by Jo. What impresses me is how Miller gets at so much of what was good about that time, the ways in which people were, in fact, allowed to cast of convention, cast off they-self images, and fashion new selves. Or so it seemed, so it felt.

But this is not simply a novel about the seventies. Indeed, it is only in a rather lengthy retrospective that we are treated to her insights on those times at all. The novel begins with Jo at about mid-life, three daughters grown and gone, a neat and successful life. She is a veterinarian, married to a liberal New England preacher, and again behaving as she is expected to, and as she expects herself to. A chance encounter reminds her of that earlier life and of how it ended, and a new kind of existential itch launches her into another period of wondering and worrying. When she tries to tell her husband how this accidental reunion with her past has disturbed her equilibrium, he is so busy with his own life, with the 'real' problems of his parishioners, that he simply cannot hear her. Instead, he passes of her angst as simply a fleeting crush on this man, Eli, who has reappeared from her past, and while he is not all wrong, he certainly misses the deeper issues.

But here's what I thought: that if I had a crush, it was on an earlier Eli, one who didn't exist anymore, and the real Eli was just a vehicle for it. Or, perhaps even more complicated, that the crush-if you could call something so psychologically distorted by such a playful name-was on myself. The middle-aged Eli contained for me, of course, his youthful self, yes. But he contained me also. The self that had known him then. Myself-when-young. And that was what made him attractive to me. You read or hear every now and then of a romance starting up between middle-aged or even elderly people who knew each other years earlier. People who throw over long-established marriages or sensible lives for the chance to love again in a particular way-a way that connects them with who they used to be, with how it felt to be that person. And now, with Eli's arrival in my life, I could understand the potency of that connection. The self-intoxication you pass of to yourself as intoxication with someone else.

And it is this theme that controls the rest of the novel, although there are plenty of insights about being a parent, about how sex ebbs and flows in long-term relationships, about the constant struggle that occurs even in successful marriages. In search of some lost self, or some new self that very much needs to emerge, Jo begins to drift from her husband, begins to entertain other possibilities, to think of herself as someone capable of infidelity, of intrigue. And this leads to other questions, both abstract and personal. What constitutes fidelity? What does it really mean to break faith? Is wanting but not doing already a kind of disloyalty? Is telling on yourself at the stage of imagination a kind of loyalty? Suppose you try to act on an impulse, but fail-is this, itself, an act of infidelity? These are the sorts of questions that Jo asks herself, and ones that Sue Miller asks her reader. I think she does an excellent job of probing a kind of innocent existential restlessness that is not confined to the middle aged (or any age), but that certainly arises often enough when lives seem for the most part settled. One of the wonderful aspects of this novel is that Miller does not presume to answer her own questions; she is perplexed by them, and I think wants her readers to be perplexed, to be shocked out of any easy and offhand answers.

There is also a mystery that plays behind the scenes in this book-one that I have no intention at all of giving away. But while the jacket cover makes much of the mystery, and while it does play a pivotal role in the novel, I'm certain that for Miller it is simply a vehicle for raising larger and more important questions. I loved this book from the very moment I picked it up; the writing is superb, the psychological insights plentiful. And she leaves us with intricate, wonderful questions. Her summation:

But perhaps this is all to the good. Perhaps it's best to live with the possibility that around any corner, at any time, may come the person who reminds you of your own capacity to surprise yourself, to put at risk everything that's dear to you. Who reminds you of the distances we have to bridge to begin to know anything about one another. Who reminds you that what seems to be-even about yourself-may not be.