Jonathan Lethem

“Motherless Brooklyn…is a story about a private eye who has Tourette’s. He is part of a gang of private eyes. They’re the muscle men, leg men, bag men, and goons of a well-known private eye about Brooklyn. They are all orphans that this guy took out of an orphanage and raised to be his sidekicks. I’m not really doing this justice, because this sounds like quite a silly premise, and it is. Part of the charm of this book is its self-awareness about the silliness of this. The book opens with their mentor and father figure, Frank Minna, going missing. It’s the story of how the Minna men—this gang, his sidekicks—try and solve the mystery of what happened to their boss. One of the things that very quickly becomes apparent is that the boss was the brains of the outfit, and none of them knows much about how to solve a mystery.” Read more...

The Best Noir Crime Thrillers

Cory Doctorow, Novelist

“This is a short novel that Jonathan Lethem published a few years ago about a bunch of young people who form a band in Los Angeles. They’re writing songs and trying to rehearse. In the course of the book, before the band breaks up, they play maybe three times – once at a radio show, once at a party and one other time. That’s their whole performing career. I’ve never read anything, whether it was fiction or nonfiction, that so completely captured the way people come together to create a piece of music that transcends anyone’s ambitions, and what each of them brought to that piece of music in terms of talent or creativity. It captures how people working together can create something that stands apart from them, and takes on its own existence and its own reason for being. What they create is alive – in a way even more than they are. It’s the Frankenstein theory of art. Lethem captures this with wonderful charm. His characters will be playing and it will all come together. As they realise what’s happening, they’re almost awestruck at what they’ve created. Then they’re terrified that it’s an illusion and that the music will somehow vanish. And that’s what happens. I’ve never read anything that captures that feeling so well.” Read more...

The best books on Rock Music

Greil Marcus, Musicians, Music Critics & Scholar

“Lethem was one of the first people to write about the new Brooklyn. Like Catcher in the Rye, Fortress of Solitude was a beautiful coming-of-age novel infused with references to the popular culture of the day.” Read more...

Essential New York Novels

Jay McInerney, Novelist