Power and dispossession in ’50s NY

The beating heart of Edward Norton’s meticulously crafted private-eye mystery Motherless Brooklyn is a highly original and poignant riff on the noir detective – a man driven into the darkest shadows of 1957 New York City by a need to understand a world that has left him a misjudged outcast.

This is Lionel Essrog, whose over-charged brain would seem to bar him from the classic detective realms of the smooth and the no-nonsense. But in making Lionel the hero of a story about power and dispossession, Norton upends a hard-boiled character and reimagines him through a prism of chaos, need and vulnerability.

When Lionel attempts to find the killer of the only man who ever cared about him, his boss Frank Minna, he is lured deeper into the city that made him. His compulsion to make order from mayhem leads him into the structural framework that holds up modern New York and into the visionary, if venal, realms of the men who drove its mid-century ascent. His search for justice becomes an odyssey that takes him into timeless forces not only of ambition, greed, bigotry and the dark allure of wielding power, but also the countervailing forces of music and emotional connection.

Almost two decades ago, Norton first read Jonathan Lethem’s inventive, genre-bending novel Motherless Brooklyn and fell in love with its hugely energetic, highly unlikely narrator. Norton saw in Lionel a universal quest to untangle the threads of who he is and how he might rise above a chaotic world.

Norton told Lethem that he intended to be faithful to the spirit of Lionel, but to entirely switch up the plot. Lethem was intrigued. “I’ve long been interested in what was happening behind the scenes in the development of New York in the late 1950s, when old New York became the modern city. It’s a very charged place to put Lionel. Jonathan is as passionate a student of New York as I am, and he completely understood what I hoped to do.” –