Lesson Plan Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

And then Gilbert becomes a little bit of an anodyne to that loss, a pothole instead of a bottomless well of grief: Rescue isn't completely hopeless," etc. Tony was essential from the start. Should I say he's based on a kid I knew?

Um, several real-life sources, cough, cough. Danny was more filler. I mean, I knew he had to be somebody fun and interesting in fact I ended up borrowing from the future, just like George W. I just didn't know how he'd be essential to the book. But when you're lucky, as I was in several ways during this writing, everything has its purpose. I had no inkling Danny was destined to inherit the agency until I got to the last chapter, but it seems obvious now, doesn't it?

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem Lesson Plans

In As She Climbed Across the Table, you send up academia, and the absurdities of that small, self-sustaining world. At one point, Georges De Tooth, the resident deconstructionist, pitches his proposal to study Lack, the hole in the universe opened up by Professor Soft, saying "Physics seeks to dismantle the surface, perceive beyond it, to a truth comprised of particles; I argue against depth wherever I find it.

Lack's meaning is all on the surface What is your opinion of the business of literary criticism, and further, is there anything writers can learn from literary criticism of their work? Defensiveness requires writers including myself say otherwise, constantly, but of course. Another aspect of As She Climbed Across the Table is an evolution of the Koan about one hand clapping, in the form of the twin blind men, Garth and Evan, who propose a new theory on perception, that true perception comes from within and not from without an idea another character, Dawn, espouses in Amnesia Moon.

How did the germ of this idea begin, and how did you conceive of Garth and Evan to carry the idea in the novel? Subjectivity isn't a new theory of perception.

You're flattering me by taking it backwards, as though the ideas were profound and the characters mere vehicles. Anyway, they were hardly conceived as a vehicle. I just saw them one day: Then they needed to have something to say, so I pillaged Borges and Rashamon. How did the idea of writing a narrative around Lack manifest in your mind? Does Lack have kin in Contemporary American Fiction?

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His twin is the narrator of John Barth's End of the Road, a novel which obsessed me. Barth's book is told from the point of view of an inert and diffident character who steals away the wife of a dynamic professorial blowhard. The professor is appalled to lose in a romantic triangle to a cipher, a void. So, I made the void literal and shifted the viewpoint. And then made the whole thing cuddly, and more contemporary and Delillo-ish. Though now that I think about it, if you know the Barth, it makes the 'cold steel table' aspect of my book a little bit yucky. In Amnesia Moon the entire world is not what or where it should be, yet one constant is the presence of televangelists from all faiths and the indifferent masses.

What were you trying to say about religion in the book? I have to keep flipping these questions around. The televangelist robots came first, as an image, as a joke, as a Philip K. Dick-ian riff on the mechanization and co-modification of, well, anything passionate, anything native and human. It was funny and made me picture these robots with television heads and babbling religious leaders on the screens of the televisions.

I wanted my character to meet one of these things. Toward the end of Amnesia Moon , the residents of Vacaville have their appearance altered to pale in comparison to those of the "government stars," who are more beautiful than the average person so much so that residents can only buy Playboy according to their body type. What is your opinion of the tyranny of beauty in our culture as perpetuated by the media, etc.? Much what you'd imagine. But it's awful because it preys on and interfaces with all sorts of horrible Darwinianly hardwired body instincts.

It just milks them to death. But again, I was only trying to be funny. That scene with the porn is like a rebus. Like a Jenny Holzer billboard, or a Laurie Anderson song. There's an opinion in there, but it's not my own. The scene is built on the foundation of a cultural critique just about every second person in Berkeley in which is where I was when I wrote it was already walking around with, fully formed, in their head.

If I claimed to have originated those observations I'd be a madman. Do you have favorite books that you read over and over? There's no sense to them as a grouping, I suspect.

Just talismans, singular objects, some or all flawed, which keep me going, like friends. James Salter's Light Years. John Barth's End of the Road.

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Patricia Highsmith's The Cry of the Owl. James Baldwin's Another Country. Don Delillo's White Noise. Robert Heinlein's Door Into Summer. Forster's A Passage to India. Parts of Samuel Delany's Dhalgren. But really none of those compares with the small group of children's books I've read many dozens of times: Or, honestly, certain books of music writing I've read hundreds of times. What was your experience with publishing your first book, Gun, With Occasional Music? That experience was delirious. I was paid six thousand dollars by Harcourt Brace. My editor had worked with Stanislaw Lem and Umberto Eco.

And he showed it to another editor in the house, an 'old hand', who said my overtly Chandler-esque prose wasn't an insult to Chandler.

Teaching Motherless Brooklyn

And who would hire out these bad boys to solve a real mystery? Yet when the boss gets whacked, Essrog is faced with a murder to solve, and a trail of clues that lead to unexpected places—including the Yorkville Zendo, Maine's only Thai and sushi ocean - food emporium, deceptive storefronts and foreboding corporate offices.

Local color is a Lethem trademark, and when he is in his groove the locals stand out in Technicolor relief. His characters here are vivid in a modern Dickensian sense, with that strange combination of parody and plausibility that you find in the Victorian master, and they are invariably presented as grounded in their own distinctive settings. We encounter Rockaforte and Matricardi, two Italian gentlemen of dubious professional talents who are so perfectly matched with their creepy apartment that I am inevitably reminded of Miss Haversham and her ruined mansion in Great Expectations.

We run with Tony, Danny and Gilbert, survivors of the Brooklyn boys home who possess both the street smarts and crudity of Fagin and the other urchins of Oliver Twist. And amidst this squalor, the individual who may possibly turn out to be the Copperfield-esque hero of his own life or maybe not , our narrator and stand-in sleuth Lionel Essrog. Essrog is one of the great characters of modern American fiction. But Lethem is after something deeper here. In his follow-up novel The Fortress of Solitude , Lethem explored the pathos of youngsters whose home life forces them to search for parenting on the mean streets.

This type of coming-of-age story is bound to be both profoundly sad and dazzlingly unexpected in its twists and turns. Minna assigns Lionel Essrog the less-than-kind nickname "Freakshow. When he hears his own name, his mind begins forming the alternatives: Kindle Edition , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. May 08, David Currie rated it it was amazing. Cathy rated it really liked it Apr 26, Elisabeth Richardson rated it really liked it Apr 03, Psmithsted rated it really liked it Aug 07, Jeff rated it really liked it Jul 08, Linda Muller rated it really liked it Mar 18, David O'Dell rated it really liked it Mar 16, Jordi Martinez rated it liked it Sep 08, Amy Farley rated it really liked it Jun 18, Hendrik II rated it liked it Jan 27, Lisa Korajczyk rated it really liked it Jun 15, Granny rated it really liked it Jan 24, Kaj rated it did not like it Jan 24, Mike Thompson rated it really liked it Jul 23,