By: Jonathan Lethem Publisher: Vintage Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Vintage Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 528 Publication Date: August 24, 2004 Release Date: August 24, 2004
Product Description: The Fortress of Solitude is the story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. It’s a neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along with games of stoopball. In that world, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. As Lethem follows the knitting and unraveling of their friendship, he creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory. The Fortress of Solitudeis the first great urban coming of age novel to appear in years.
Magic in the familiar My son, who is now 38, told me I must read this novel, without telling me why, just "Trust me." So I did, and saw immediately why. Throughout the first 16 years of his life, we--he and I and his mother--lived in the exact neighborhood where this story is centered. In fact, at one point the protagonist, Dylan, is looking out the back window of a friend's house on Pacific Street between Hoyt and Bond, across the backyards and into the windows of the apartments above the antique stores on Atlantic Avenue--which meant he was very possibly looking into the back windows of our apartment. For me the story is filled with similar shocks of recognition; Lethem's acute eye for detail makes this one of the most hypnotically fascinating novels I've read in the last decade, and reading it really was like a visceral visit to a place so familiar that even after almost 25 years away from it, its sensory textures could be evoked in an instant. So of course I'm a special case, as is my son; I have no way of knowing how someone who has never been to or lived in Boerum Hill and its surrounding neighborhoods would relate to the story. That said, I had a similar experience to that of several other reviewers in that when the story took its sharp turn into the fantastical, I was initially jarred. Possibly I shouldn't have been--after all, the title telegraphs this possibility, referring as it does to the Arctic stronghold of the world's seminal comic-book superhero. But that feeling didn't last, and ultimately I felt that Lethem was saying something true and perhaps universal about the places where we grow up--that for every child, behind the ordinary reality of familiar places lies the possibility of magic.
Great read Really dug this one. Cool story, lots of music and comic book references, and good pace. Recommended.
Play that funky music, white boy What is it like to grow up a white child in a black world, "yoked" in a double-bind that keeps you small and paralyzed? It's not something you can talk about, and I never saw anyone so astutely describe the experience until I read this book.
Lethem's semi-autobiographical novel reveals itself gradually, like a multi-layered painting. During his early childhood, the protagonist lurches zombie-like through a thick fog, smothered by grim surroundings and events that he cannot control or even understand. Gradually, as he matures, the fog starts to lift. And we see how his victimization has carved into Dylan's psyche a complex love-hate obsession with blacks and a burning need to be a hero - or maybe to get revenge.
This book is about betrayals, about the illusory nature of autonomy and choice, about the costs (and rewards) of fulfilling one's class and race destiny by leaving one's roots behind.
And the ring? Is it magical realism, as some have proposed? I see it more as a metaphor. Initially, it is about power and the freedom of escape. Later, it stands for invisibility, the feeling of being unseen and unknown by those around you.
The topic is painful and the style meandering. But it is a great book.
Problems in the Third Act I was really loving this book and recommending it to people through the first half of the book. But when the point of view changed to first person halfway through I lost interest. I finished it though. This book could have been a lot shorter, although thats easy for me to say, I didn't have to wrap it up.
I agree that there were really no likable characters left at the the end, which was too bad because the first half really had me pulling for these guys and thinking about them between readings.
I think the writing is fantastic and the author is very talented. Friends have recommended Motherless Brooklyn as a superior book to this and I will seek that out and read it. I am glad I read it but almost didn't finish it just out of spite, I was so disappointed with it near the end. Like the guy at the movie pitch says, there are some problems with the Third Act.
Amen.
A Man Out Standing In His Field Any fan of Lethem knows that his writing defies most conventions. You get the sense, more than in most contemporary (dare I say literary?) authors, that Lethem is willing to let his novelistic worlds swell out to the furthest reaches of his imagination. He's not about absurdism for its own sake (a Pythonesque "psycho gratia psychosis," if I may); his worlds play according to solid rules, but those rules aren't any more sensible than the genre-bending oddities they contain. Check out Amnesia Moon, As She Climbed Across the Table, or any of his short story collections. You'll see what I mean. His stuff is, in a word, weird.
And good. Really good. Few things are greater than reading a book by a talented author who is writing for, if anyone, himself. And Lethem is talented. One of the first things they'll teach you in English Lit 101 is that any writer worth his salt chooses words not because they're pretty or for their utilitarian bluntness, but also because language itself is so slippery, so self-subsumed. Everything means something. Carver knew this. Woolf knew this. Lethem, too. His words, with all their weighty import, soar above their subject matter. You can pick up one of his books, read about a gangster kangaroo going head-to-head with a hard-boiled detective from the future, and get the sense that there's more there than just a sci-fi nod to Philip K. Dick.
"The Fortress of Solitude" is Lethem's most contemporary novel, and also his most autobiographical, and it bucks his old habits just as much as those old habits bucked everything else. It's a bildungsromanian masterpiece (I know; another English Lit word) about growing up white in Brooklyn. Its delicate detail is very real, very lovingly harsh, the tale of young Dylan Ebdus (white) and his pal Mingus Rude (black) as they grow old and learn the fragile economics of race, social class, and stoopball. Their lives revolve around what can be learned from music, from drugs, and from the mechanics of friendship. The book bears Lethem's love of language, as well as the evidence of his own motherless past (Motherless Brooklyn, anyone?) and life with a father who was (like Dylan's) a devoted artist.
Lethem has divided the tale into two halves, the split occurring right about the time Dylan discovers the dirty, dreary and dynamic contours of adulthood. The second half of the book, while well-told, isn't as tight as the first; it seems like a second-thought counterpoint to the first half's heart-breaking simplicity. Lethem, showing where Dylan's and Mingus's paths have led, tries to make a point about "middle places," those nameless and usually innocuous moments that make up the most potent of nostalgias (and the book is, if anything, a tribute to and criticism of nostalgia). The novel is filled with instances of these middle places, but they are more recognizable after the turn of the last page. That's probably the point.
Even with its adequately humorless maturity, the second half of the book is good stuff, solid, interesting, if not disjointed. In fact, the only thing that really drags the novel down is Lethem's (habitual?) need to add a small dose of unreality. In this case, the "weird" of the book concerns a small ring that bestows superpowers onto its wearer. Lethem uses the ring to make a few (sometimes) obvious and (occasionally) intriguing points about life and hopes and dreams. It's kind of cool, a tad interesting, but mostly it's just distracting. Lethem goes to such sublimely strenuous lengths to make his tale authentic to its time; then he introduces this supernatural element, and the characters treat it as a mildly curious but easily dismissable anomaly.
But, hey, that's Lethem, treating the weird as if it were no more or less out of place than anything else. While it might scar his otherwise sweet and sterling story, it also acts as evidence that Lethem is never completely willing to succumb to the cranky rules of reality (even that of his own childhood) or to the stuffy expectations that are usually part and parcel with coming-of-age novels such as this one. Even if it soars like its own kind of crippled superhero, this novel is ten times as ambitious, and every bit as amazing.
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