Motherless Brooklyn

“They’re an invisible army on a peacekeeping mission, a peaceable horde. They mean no harm. They placate, interpret, massage.”

Lionel explains his difficult relationship with the words he cannot control by pointing out that although the torrent of words disquiets others, the words are harmless, even comforting. 

“I chewed on a Castle instead and gazed out the windshield, brain going Characteristic autistic mystic tic dipstick dickweed.’”

This italicized passage while Lionel is on stakeout reveals the novel’s complex use of apparent nonsense to create an intricate sound-weave. We are invited to read the passage aloud and to allow the sense and nonsense to slide into each other, like the slider Lionel eats. 

“I set out to read every book in that tomblike library, every miserable dead donation ever indexed and forgotten there—a mark of my profound fear and boredom at St. Vincent’s and as well an early sign of my Tourettic compulsion for counting, processing, and inspection.”

The psychology of a young Lionel centers on his sense of loneliness and disconnection because he is unaware that his compulsions are elements of a condition.