“Motherless Brooklyn” by Jonathan Lethem (post 5): Parallel plots—detective story and Tourette’s (cover story for multiple personality)—continue

As previous discussed, this novel has two parallel plots: 1. the protagonist is a detective trying to solve a murder, and 2. he has Tourette’s, a neurological syndrome of behavioral and vocal tics, which, in this novel, is given psychological symptoms of multiple personality that are not part of real-life Tourette’s.

The protagonist’s Tourette’s is a cover story, camouflage, for the author’s discussion of multiple personality, which is referred to by euphemisms, such as “Multi-Mind”:

“…my Multi-Mind, that tangle of responses and mimicking, of interruptions of interruptions” (1, p. 195).

When the protagonist has a sexual encounter with a young woman, it is “as though she were negotiating a new understanding between my two disgruntled brains” (1, p. 220):

As the sexual encounter progresses, his nonsexual, alternate personality, “Bailey, he left town,” and the protagonist temporarily feels like he has only “One Mind” (1, p. 222).

1. Jonathan Lethem. Motherless Brooklyn. New York, Doubleday, 1999.