' In a sense, this is detective work as medical condition, stemming from a pathological need to poke at experience, to process its patterns, 'putting hairs in place, putting ducks in rows, replacing divots.' (Think Yugoslavia after Tito, or the Bowery Boys without Leo Gorcey to keep them all in line.) As Frank's deputy, Tony tries to control the investigation, but Lionel has his own reasons - some of them Tourette's- related - for getting to the bottom of Frank's murder: 'My words begin plucking at the threads nervously, seeking purchase, a weak point. With Frank's murder, this miniature fiefdom loses its suzerain, and in the scramble to find the killer, long-submerged tensions begin to pull the Minna Men apart. Calling themselves Minna Men, the four have become vassals in Frank's scruffy little fiefdom, and like the members of any feudal hierarchy, each has found his particular niche: Tony is the implicit second-in-command, the lesser noble to Frank's lord of the manor Danny is the enigmatic knight-errant, distant and of uncertain loyalty Gilbert is the earthy, none too intelligent serf and Lionel, nicknamed Freakshow because of his constant verbal tics and physical twitches, is the fool, the court jester, whose antics the others tolerate with the indulgence that forced proximity dictates.

Lionel is Frank's factotum, one of four misfits from a local orphanage Frank has commandeered to work in his seedy and makeshift detective agency. The world of 'Motherless Brooklyn' is, of course, the borough of the title, and what disrupts its sense of order is the stabbing death of a small-time neighborhood operator named Frank Minna. Lethem, after all, walks the serious-fiction beat, and in his hands the compulsions of Tourette's become a kind of kaleidoscopic metaphor, ultimately (and somewhat paradoxically) reflecting the fundamental ethos of the mystery genre itself: the compulsion to restore order and rightness to a world thrown temporarily out of joint. Maybe his Tourette's is a gimmick, but it's a gimmick with depth, with soul. But Lionel Essrog, the twitching, barking, gabbling narrator of Jonathan Lethem's new novel, 'Motherless Brooklyn,' is no movie- of- the-week novelty grafted onto a noir mystery. Sounds like a gimmick, right? Another in the endless line of diversity dicks - sleuths in wheelchairs, lesbian lieutenants, investigators who also happen to be heroin addicts or restaurant critics or codgers as old as Angela Lansbury.

A detective with Tourette's syndrome narrates a hard-boiled crime novel.

Osierocony brooklyn jonathan lethem