Wordplay

By NADYA LABI

If you're prone to touching strangers randomly and shouting insults like "Eat me Mister Dicky-weed!" becoming a detective is probably not the most obvious career move. Case in point: Lionel Essrog, a Brooklyn P.I. who can't shoot a gun but can spend the better part of a stakeout obsessing over the numerical integrity of his meal (six White Castle burgers at 6:45). He's got Tourette's syndrome and--by the end of the first chapter of Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (Doubleday; 311 pages; $23.95)--a dead boss on his hands.

Frank Minna wasn't just any boss. He was the epitome of hustler cool, a guy who offered four teenagers, just about the only whites at a predominantly black orphanage, the distinction of becoming his errand boys. For Essrog the decision was a no-brainer. At St. Vincent's Home for Boys he was choking on a flood of words and impulses in need of release. "Language bubbled inside me now, the frozen sea melting, but it felt too dangerous to let out." Over the next 15 years Minna encouraged Essrog to speak (in shouts, non sequiturs, stupid riddles) and taught him the new vocabulary of belonging. Essrog and his buddies became Minna Men--detectives who knew how to follow Minna's orders blindly.

But when Minna turns up leaking blood, Essrog finally starts asking questions. Just what were all those errands for? And why would Minna retell a joke instead of fingering his killer in his final moments? Finding out whodunit is interesting enough, but it's more fun watching Lethem unravel the mysteries of his Tourettic creation. In this case, it takes one trenchant wordsmith to know another.

--By Nadya Labi