Lonely Dumptruck

What do the following names have in common?

Conrad Metcalf   Everett Moon   Pella Marsh   Philip Engstrand
Effram Nugent   Lionel Essrog   Dylan Ebdus   Mingus Rude

Would you choose any of these names for your child?

Orton   Pansy   Ilford   Ralfrew   Marilla   Runyon   Euclid   Moira

These are not names you hear everyday—unless you spend your days reading Jonathan Lethem. The first set of names are of lead characters in six of Lethem's novels. The second set appear as minor characters.

Even when Lethem selects a common name—unlike those that seem more anagram than name—you can almost bet he'll pair it with an outrageous surname:

Danny Phoneblum   Timothy Vandertooth   Paul Pflug   Danny Fantl

He also seems as likely to scan the dictionary as the phonebook for inspiration. No noun or verb is too insignificant to be considered a potential name:

Maurice Gospels   Walter Surface   Harriman Crash   Abigail Ponders

Lethem clearly enjoys giving his characters original, often bizarre, names. Here are several others from The Fortress of Solitude:

Aaron X. Doiley   Erlan Hagopian   OJJJ   Zelmo Swift

With the publication in 1998 of the science fiction novel, "Girl, In Landscape," Jonathan Lethem really hit his creative stride in imaginative naming. The novel envisions an alien species that speaks hundreds of languages, but becomes fascinated with English as a language of "enchanting limitations," giving themselves inscrutable names formed from English words:

Hiding Kneel   Truth Renowned   Gelatinous Stand
Specious Axiomatic   Grinning Contrivance   Notable Beast
Somber Fluid   Lonely Dumptruck

Lethem spoke the other night of Tourette's syndrome, a logical topic because Motherless Brooklyn is his unforgettably original novel about a detective afflicted with Tourette's. But while claiming no clinical manifestations of having Tourette's himself, Lethem admitted that he empathizes with some of the compulsions, and he spoke of how he distractedly plays with words and names and revealed that he keeps a notebook of potential character names, currently filled with over seven hundred entries.

That struck me as a pretty remarkable statement when one considers the names he has selected for the characters in his published novels. It would be a fascinating opportunity to flip through the notebook with Lethem and hear him comment on the names.

Lionel Essrog, the Tourettic detective of Motherless Brooklyn, often manifests his condition with verbal tics. His explosive outbursts give Lethem an opportunity to dazzle with jewels of creative wordplay, like these examples of Lionel butchering a name, often his own:

Criminal Fishrug   Viable Guessfrog   Lionel Deathclam
Lefthand Moonprose   Lullaby Gueststar   Licorice Smellahole

Of course, aliens and Tourette's syndrome give a novelist like Lethem a convenient landscape for demonstrating his verbal pyrotechnics. But after reading The Fortress of Solitude and hearing Lethem speak, I'm now convinced that he has no intention of ever populating any of his novels, regardless of genre, with characters with such quotidian names as Jack Ryan, Alex Cross, Robert Kincaid, or Jack Torrance.