RaveThe GuardianAuthor Jonathan Lethem...has created, from what sounds like a ludicrous gimmick, one of fiction\'s most memorable narrators. Through Lionel - nickname Freakshow - he explores the relationship between what makes us tic and what makes us tick ... The results are playfully poetic. It\'s as if Benjy from Faulkner\'s The Sound and the Fury had escaped on to the pages of Raymond Chandler ... Lethem found it natural to place his obsessively twitchy protagonist within a crime-novel plot...The effect is gleefully absurd, even if the formulaic gumshoe plot pales next to the twinkle-toed narrative footwork ... At points, Lethem\'s conception of Lionel\'s syndrome is brilliantly vivid ... In Motherless Brooklyn, Tourette\'s is a microcosm of the human condition. Lionel describes it as something outside himself, like an invisible friend. It reminds us of the duality of human consciousness, how we all make war with our own gibbering interior monologues, because the brain has a mind, if you will, of its own.
