The View From Scranton

Urban Urchining

If the Hollywood set city-slicking of Peter Gunn leaves me itchy for action, the actual urbanity of Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn has left me a miss more than leaving itself. The walk-and-talk, the candor, the quick. The “forest of skyscrapers.” The “thirsty face.“ Even a dimwit doorman leaves me aching for New York.

And laughing for air. His uber hero, the Tourettic Lionel Essrog, is a gas. Light heady and vapored. And his spill on the doofus garbage cop is priceless:

"In fact, I hated Loomis… [h]is imprecision and laziness maddened my compulsive instincts -- his patchiness, the way even his speech was riddled with drop-outs and glitches like a worn cassette, the way his leaden senses refused the world, his attention like a pinball rolling past unlit blinkers and frozen flippers into the hole again and again: game over. He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict. And he was too moronic to be properly self-loathing -- so it was my duty to loathe him instead."

How did I miss this book?

posted by John Hood. @ 10:09 AM