Motherless Brooklyn

The book is Motherless Brooklyn and the author is Jonathan Lethem. To my knowledge, this is the first full length work of fiction that features a narrator with Tourette's Syndrome. Besides the Tourettes's, our hero, Lionel Essrog, was raised in a Brooklyn orphanage which earned him my immediate sympathy and undivided interest. The author has definitely done his research on the condition. With a brain that constantly mangles, twists and interchanges words, Lionel takes the reader along on his tortuous journey as he tries to solve the murder of his long time mentor. Luc Sante called the book "funny, dizzying and heartbreaking". I agree.