Surely, Ross Macdonald would never throw so big a stick into the spokes Lethem not only takes this risk but further gums

Men,'' the four orphans he more or less adopts from St. After the obligatory opening - a stakeout that culminates in the murder of a detective'sīoss - Lethem provides a dilatory flashback to fill us in on the principals: Frank Minna, a small-time operator and the chief eminence of a car service-detective agency in downtown Brooklyn, and his ''Minna This is amply apparent nearly a third of the way into his new novel, ''Motherless Brooklyn,'' another go-round with the hard-boiled genre. Is in no hurry to get to his point he is refitting the model for a slower drive with plenty of time to take in the sights. Unlike most straight genre practitioners, Lethem Which also included an adolescent girl's coming-of-age tale - cheated neither science fiction nor the western while giving birth to something fresh and strange. He so persuasively wove the plot of John Ford's classic western ''The Searchers'' into a tale of interplanetary travel that the joining felt not merely seamless but inevitable. His last novel, ''Girl in Landscape,'' gave elegant proof of his acute sense of genre convention The title of Lethem's first novel, ''Gun, With Occasional Music,'' set its tone of judiciously mixed spoof and homage. Popular novels, Lethem is like a kid in a candy store, grabbing all the tasty plots and gimmicks he can. Dick, who successfully blurred the lines between serious and Taking his cue from writers like Don DeLillo and Philip K. Jonathan Lethem appears to be both a scholar and a wide-eyed fan of any and all genre fiction. Udging by the energetic catholicity of his literary appropriations - the hard-boiled novel, science fiction, westerns and the academic novel. The young narrator of this post-modern detective novel suffers from Tourette's syndrome.

Book review motherless brooklyn