The year is 1899, and Olympia Biddeford, the headstrong daughter of a Boston Brahmin family, has decided to test the limits of her cloistered world. Spending the summer at her father's New Hampshire estate, the teenage heroine of Fortune's Rocks is entranced with the visiting salon of artists, writers, and lawyers --- and especially by John Haskell, a charismatic physician.
Like some sort of Mendelian hybrid, Lethem's MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN is a cross between a classic detective story, a satire of that same story, and a literary exegesis on the infinite complexities of language.
