Archive of the Forgotten: Charles Yu on Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude

I’m a back-of-the-store guy. My dream: a large, dusty used bookshop. Shelves and shelves of trade paperbacks, pages not quite yellowing, maybe off-white. Vintages and anchors and penguins crammed against each other, mostly alphabetized, a bit of randomness tossed into the system by the intentional or careless hands of readers interested for a moment, and then not so much. Spine out. Only titles and author names visible, the bare minimum of information to go on.

What are you going to pick? How are you going to spend your lunch break, your coffee break, the next two minutes or two hours or two weeks? Do you share this dream with me? If so, you know that the stakes are high. Choose correctly and you might find the holy grail. Here, alone, under fluorescent lights. A secret decoder ring, a magical object that unlocks your hidden powers.

Somewhere in the slightly warped pages of your own private discovery, selected by whatever mysterious algorithm governs the whims and desires of the lonely browser, the desperate searcher, you will make your choice, consciously or otherwise. What are you looking for, back-of-the-store-guy, on a Saturday night, five minutes to closing? People outside on Telegraph are already drunk and heading for the next place. You’re in the fiction section looking for something deeper, something special, preferably under ten bucks. You’re in here because of the dream. Choose correctly and you might find a sentence that will change your life.

Jonathan Lethem is a rare writer. A back-of-the-store guy who ended up on the front tables, and then the front page of the book review. My own private secret decoder ring. I’m actually the guy who discovered Lethem. And then discovered all my friends and professors had beaten me to the punch. Not only is Lethem living the dream, for a certain kind of nerd (this one), he is the dream: outsider and insider. Standout and dropout. Fanfic as canon. Liner notes as literature.

Before Reddit threads and Wikis, before message boards, there has always been this energy, back-of-the-store energy, the energy of people obsessing over details. Lethem has channeled that energy, harnessed it into a superhuman level of discernment, the power to make subtle distinctions, taxonomies, to catalog the world. Along with others in his cohort (Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, George Saunders, to name a few), Lethem helped to re-map contemporary fiction, erasing boundaries, revealing new rivers and streams, places with good vistas and fertile soil, places to build from and expand. Some time early this century, the capital of literary moved from realism to a far-flung outpost in the genres. Lethem was at the frontier.

*

But before he was a front-of-the-store author, he was the clerk in the stacks, and before that he was a boy growing up in a bohemian commune in Brooklyn, the son of Richard Brown Lethem, a painter, and Judith Frank Lethem, an activist; the latter Jonathan Lethem has described as “the most forceful and extraordinary person” that he knew. He was only fourteen when Judith died of a brain tumor; the profound loss was a formative event for Jonathan as writer:

What I do is use something tangible I can get hold of; often that’s my mother’s death. I think I’ve written about motherless children in many different ways and at different times…my mother…the one who seemed to hold everything together, and a great creator of meaning and feeling herself was lost. I didn’t experience this as disenchantment; I experienced it as a confirmation: everything I’ve been warned about in the world can come all the way to you and reach you in your own center.

As a teenager, Lethem attended the High School of Music & Art in New York, where he published a zine and created animated films. In 1982, he matriculated at Bennington College in Vermont, intent on studying art. It was a lateral move. Lethem went from being a white kid in Gowanus to being a public-school kid in a private college where, surrounded by classmates who came from wealth and privilege, Lethem was an outsider again. Realizing he wanted to be a writer, Lethem dropped out of Bennington in his second year. He hitchhiked across the country and ending up in Berkeley, California, where he worked at a number of bookstores, including Pegasus and Pendragon, landing finally at the venerable Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue:

It was at Moe’s, in that huge literature section, that I was constantly discovering all these forgotten authors that I ended up being powerfully influenced by. Just handling this ocean of different books—new and used, in and out of print, famous and forgotten—it was literature as this giant mosaic of texts and experiments and attitudes.

That influence can be felt in his early novels, written while Lethem was still working as a bookseller, including his Gun, With Occasional Music (which drew comparisons to Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick) and As She Climbed Across the Table (my first Lethem, I read most of it one afternoon in Berkeley while seated upstairs at Cafe Milano on Bancroft, stopping occasionally to watch two old men play chess; a quarter-century later, I still remember it as one of the books that made me want to write fiction.)

In 1996, Lethem moved back to New York City and began writing Motherless Brooklyn, the story of Lionel Essrog, a would-be detective with Tourette’s syndrome, whom Lethem has said is the character of his with whom he most identifies. Through Lionel, compulsion becomes the engine of endless variation: an unceasing performance of manic improvisation. Lionel can’t help but riff on anything and everything. For Lionel, the city and its inhabitants are an infinite source of surprise, epiphany and error, chatter and gossip, a never-ending stream of natural speech to be heard and misheard. In Lionel’s mind, fragments of language evolve through recombination and mutation, branching out in new directions. Most of those directions trail off into nonsense, but a few wander their way into discovery, into new meanings.

Early on in the novel, Lionel loses his boss and mentor, Frank Minna. For Lionel, Frank is more than that: he’s a kind of father figure, a protector to Lionel and the other Minna Men. With Minna gone, the center of their world has been removed, and Minna’s acolytes spin centrifugally in different directions. Previously tethered to each other through employment and in their shared identity, the Minna Men find themselves alone. For Lionel in particular, this is hard—he’s lost not only a benefactor but a shield, an insulating layer between himself and other people. Without Minna, Lionel and his Tourette’s must now navigate their own way through the mystery. Retracing steps and piecing together clues. Paying visits to acquaintances, old and new, friendly and not-so-friendly. It’s hard enough being a detective. For Lionel it’s a uniquely difficult challenge being exposed to so much direct, unfiltered contact with all of the messy particulars of the world. As he says of himself, Lionel has not only Tourette’s but also meta-Tourette’s. Not just ticcing, but “[t]hinking about ticking… mind racing, thoughts reaching to touch every possible symptom. Touching touching. Counting counting. Thinking thinking.”

It’s in that progression from touching to thinking, longing for “ritual contact just to make myself feel at home” that Motherless Brooklyn derives its energy, its brilliance and originality. For Lionel Essrog, language is always bubbling “inside…the frozen sea melting…too dangerous to let out.” But it does come out, in spurts and squirts. And that’s the issue. It’s always there, underneath, pushing outward. The pressure has to go somewhere and it finds its conduit in language, a stream of words in search of a target. A detective looking for patterns in a world that seems to forever remain just out of grasp.

Constantly looking for meaning and, failing to find it, Lionel resorts to manufacturing it for himself. “Assertions and generalizations are…a version of Tourette’s. A way of touching the world, handling it, covering it with confirming language.” So too are conspiracies, “the making and tracing of unexpected connections a kind of touchiness, an expression of the yearning to touch the world, kiss it all over with theories, pull it close.” This touchiness, this yearning can sometimes endear him to others—those who already love or tolerate him. More often, it makes people uncomfortable, preventing intimacy, deeper contact with others, with the world underneath the words, the connection he longs for.

So Lionel stays lonely. He has his moments, brushes with people who care for him (most of all, Frank Minna), who flirt with him, who want to use him. Music is a temporary reprieve, as are cheeseburgers and self-love. Lethem has said that, underneath, his “books all have this giant, howling missing [center]—language has disappeared, or someone has vanished, or memory has gone” and this missing center is acutely felt by Lionel Essrog.

But occasionally, that missing center is located, briefly. In the form of Carlotta Minna, an “old stove” who cooks for her son Frank and his Minna Men, serves them “plates of sautéed squid and stuffed peppers,” and who gives Lionel what he craves most in a motherless city—the touch of a mother:

…Carlotta hovered…over the backs of our chairs…gently touching our heads, the napes of our necks. We pretended not to notice, ashamed in front of one another and ourselves to show that we drank in her nurturance…But we drank it. It was Christmas, after all.

*

In 2003, four years after Motherless Brooklyn, Lethem published The Fortress of Solitude. A chronicle of 1970s Brooklyn centered on Dean Street, a fictional neighborhood block and a cosmos, dense and rich with its own mythologies. A novel of breadth and depth, scope and intimacy, it’s a story of friendship and love, of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude, one white and one Black, their inner lives and outer ones, starting from their teenage adventures and following them on diverging paths through the decades.

If Lionel Essrog is the character with whom Lethem most identifies, then Dylan Ebdus is the one whose biographical details map most closely onto Lethem’s own. A Jewish kid growing up in Brooklyn, an outsider. A visible target who retreats to his room, to music and comics. The parallels extend beyond Dylan to his parents, his father Abraham, an artist, and his mother, whose role in the novel is felt less as a character and more as an absence. In the 1970s, Lethem’s own parents moved their family to Brooklyn, a section of northern Gowanus now known as Boerum Hill. As one of the few white kids in a then mostly Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood, Lethem was a visible outlier, bullied throughout his childhood. Like Dylan Ebdus, a teenage Jonathan Lethem sought refuge in music and comics. And books.

But where Motherless Brooklyn is circular, inward, relatively compact (“wheels within wheels”), The Fortress of Solitude is sprawling, spanning decades, both coasts (east then west), with detours to summer camp and then Camden (a fictional stand-in for Bennington College). It covers the idyllic (and not so idyllic) adolescent years, a period of intense friendship and closeness between Dylan and Mingus, years in which Dean Street seemed to be a whole world unto itself. Afternoons with “dazing slackness.” A period when best friends are defined by secrets, and secret identities. A period of magic. Years later, we catch up with the pair, their paths having carried them away from each other. Dylan in California. Mingus in and out of prison. The Dean Street they once inhabited now gentrified. Lost to the past. We get a sense of this loss in the words from Dylan, by then a music critic:

Voices in memory you can’t name, rich with unresolved yearning: a song you once leaned toward for an instant on the radio before finding it mawkish, embarrassing, overlush. Maybe the song knew something you didn’t yet…By chance it goes unheard for fifteen years, until the day when your own heartbreak unexpectedly finds its due date.

These two novels, each significant on their own, also fit snugly under one cover. Although their Brooklyns are different (Minna’s Court Street, the “old Brooklyn, a placid ageless surface alive underneath with talk” feels far from the Dean Street of Rude and Ebdus and Woolfolk), the two works share more than a common geography. Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude could swap titles and the result would be equally fitting, if not more so. Dylan and Mingus are both motherless. Lionel Essrog has a solitary existence, trapped in the fortress of his own mind. Music soothes his compulsions, eases the pressure, music that “toyed with feelings of claustrophobic discomfort and expulsive release… guitar and voice twitching and throbbing within obsessively delineated bounds, alternately silent and plosive.” Listening to Prince, Lionel is “exempt from [his] symptoms.” Music also provides comfort and solace to Dylan Ebdus, who writes:

The voices of Barrett Rude Jr. and the Subtle Distinctions lead nowhere, though, if not back to your own neighborhood. To the street where you live. To things you left behind.

Both Dylan and Lionel share at their center an instability. That giant, howling, missing center. A common impulse or itch, a quality that turns them inward, wheels within wheels, distinctions on top of distinctions. A nervous energy, obsessive, forever searching. Back-of-the-store guys.

Lethem has said he’s “always liked working from that sense of… license that the margins permit,” visualizing himself “writing books that were meant one day to be dusty, forgotten volumes being encountered by intrepid browsers in a used bookstore.” This volume you’re holding is one of the many reasons why that’s unlikely to happen. With fractal intensity and a seemingly encyclopedic mind, Lethem is a creator and protector of the forgotten. A possessor of secret powers. Through his work, we visit new spaces, spaces in the middle of a neighborhood block, or your best friend’s bedroom, or a summer afternoon. In the words of Dylan Ebdus:

We all pined for those middle spaces, those summer hours when Josephine Baker lay waste to Paris…when a top-to-bottom burner blazed through a subway station, renovating the world for an instant…A middle space opened and closed like a glance, you’d miss it if you blinked…In the same spirit, on Rachel’s principles, I’d been pushed out like a blind finger, to probe a nonexistent space, a whiteboy integrating public schools which were just then being abandoned, which were becoming only rehearsals for prison. Her mistake was so beautiful, so stupid, so American. It terrified my small mind, it always had. Abraham had the better idea, to try to carve the middle space on a daily basis, alone in his room…We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed.

Reading Lethem transports me back to my own middle space. Berkeley, Saturday night at Moe’s, five minutes to closing. Reading Lethem, it always seems possible I’m a detective on a case. It seems possible I am “first awake in the world, possible the world was new.”

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From Motherless Brooklyn; The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem; introduction by Charles Yu. Copyright © 2024. Available from Everyman’s Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.