Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Motherless Brooklyn, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Mystery and the Futility of Answers
Difference and Otherness
Masculinity, Father Figures, and Mentorship
Language, Communication, and Understanding
Summary
Analysis
Lionel eventually becomes aware that Gerard Minna is dead—the “debt of [his] life” has been collected. Lionel feels a kind of guilt for his role in the larger plot surrounding the Minna brothers’ death—but often tries to tell himself that the “Rama-lama-ding-dong” simply died peacefully in his sleep.
Lionel has gotten in deep with the underworld of New York City. While he knows how things work and assumes that The Clients must have had Gerard killed for his crimes against them, Frank, and Tony, he chooses to push aside the grimmer realities of what he’s learned and feign ignorance.
Themes
A few weeks later, Danny, Gilbert, Loomis, and Lionel sit at a table in the L&L storefront in the middle of the night playing cards. Gilbert has been released from lockup—no evidence connects him to Ullman’s murder. Loomis is now a driver for L&L. Danny is their de facto leader—but Lionel still has no clue what Danny does or doesn’t know about Gerard and Fujisaki. L&L is now a clean detective agency—so clean that it has no clients. They still operate as a car service in order to scrape by.
Here, Lethem shows that although things have moved on, the Minna Men—what’s left of them, anyway—are working to preserve their mentor’s legacy while making the sacrifices to keep the business legitimate—a move that Frank, who was in too deep on all sides, could never afford to make.
Themes
Lionel is always making assertions—this, he observes, is something he has in common with detectives in detective stories. He points that assertions and generalizations—for example, the exhausted, cynical gaze of the detective—are Tourettic in nature: a way of handling, understanding, touching, and confirming the world.
In this passage, Lionel draws a comparison between himself and the tropes of detective fiction. The Tourettic impulse to understand, control, and in a way possess the world around one at any cost, is similar to the impulse of the detective archetype. Both types, Lionel suggests, are heavily tied to a desire to touch and understand the larger world—no matter what that understanding reveals about society and the people in it.
Themes
The Yorkville Zendo’s students trickle away after Gerard’s “disappearance.” Frank Minna, Lionel says, had Minna Men—Gerard Minna only had Zen stooges. Wallace takes over the Zendo as sensei, or apprentice-instructor. Both Frank and Gerard’s enterprises—L&L and the Zendo—are steered past corruption. Lionel learns about the changes at the Zendo from Kimmery when he sees her two weeks after his return from Maine in order to give her back her keys. Kimmery also tells Lionel that she is moving back in with her ex-boyfriend. After Kimmery delivers the news, she asks Lionel if he is okay. “Okay,” he replies, repeating the word over and over again, performing tics wildly.
In informing the readers of the aftermath of the novel’s events, Lethem ties up his loose ends—and demonstrates the ways in which many of the climactic, tumultuous, emotionally significant plot points of the novel simply fizzle out after the main action ends. This narrative trick ties in with the overarching theme about the futility of answers: sometimes, the answer to a mystery is anticlimactic and unfulfilling, as is everything that follows in the solution’s wake.
Themes
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Lionel often dreams of Minna. Though he misses him, Lionel has no desire for vengeance, having once visited the labyrinth of the underworld and come out the other side. He tries to pretend that he never rode this train—that the labyrinth is not there. He enjoys the work he does for L&L as a driver, and takes pleasure in visiting obscure, out-of-the way restaurants, such as a small falafel spot called Mushy’s at JFK Airport, after many of his drives.
Lionel decides to take comfort and refuge in life’s small things rather than concern himself with vengeance and destruction. The invocation of the symbol of food, however, ominously foreshadows that while Lionel might find temporary comfort in these distractions, the very real threat of the underworld and its dark, sprawling pull remain palpable in Lionel’s life, in the lives of those around him, and in the city in which he lives.
Themes
Lionel feels sorry for those who lived than those who died—such as Julia. Guilty as he feels about what happened to her, he never tries to look for her. Lionel is haunted by other ghosts, too, such as the specter of Ullman—a man who never even appeared in Lionel’s long, winding trip through the underworld. Lionel tries to remind himself that he can’t feel guilty all the time about the fates of people he never happened to meet. All that’s left to do, Lionel says, is to “tell your story walking.”
In the novel’s final lines, Lionel laments all of the unknowable things and the impossible-to-save people one encounters throughout life. At the same time, however, he uses a piece of wisdom gleaned from his mentor Frank to explain his intention to move on with his life and stay on the side of the light. All the while, he keeps about him a profound awareness of what he’s seen, encouraging the reader to “tell your story walking”—that is, to accept what’s happened and to keep moving forward.
Themes
