The Fortress of Solitude

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.

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 se

For the past couple of years, when my fiancé has been asked his opinion about a book, he's often been replying, "It was really good -- but not as good as Fortress of Solitude." (Books he's said this about: Kavalier and Clay, Everything is Illuminated, and Motherless Brooklyn, for example.) So I finally got around to reading it, and I have a feeling I'm going to be saying the same thing for quite some time. I absolutely loved this book; as soon as I finished the last page (breathless and in tears), I wanted to flip back to page one and start again, just so I could keep living in the world I'd been sharing with Lethem's characters for the last few weeks. (And I would have, but my fiancé's got first dibs on re-reading.) A number of reviewers have complained that this book is slow, and I don't disagree. Fortress of Solitude is absolutely not a plot-driven book -- you won't be desperately flipping the pages to follow the characters through their adventures, skimming ahead to find out who lives or dies or what the next twist will be -- at least not often. The only other Lethem I've read is Motherless Brooklyn, which was essentially a murder mystery, so the two books differ greatly in their pacing and structure. If you loved Motherless Brooklyn, as I did, you may be surprised by how different the two books are. But the slow, descriptive, poetic quality of Fortress of Solitude was, in my view, its greatest strength. Dylan Ebdus is the main character of this book, but its real subject, I think, is not so much Dylan as it is Brooklyn. This is a book about childhood and the process of growing up, and about a country and a neighborhood changing over the course of 30 years, more than it is a book about particular events in its characters' lives. And that description could make it sound like this is an abstract book -- but like the best art, it achieves universality only through the closely observed particularity of its subject. Because, on the page, it is just this: an artful description of particular events in its characters' lives. After finishing it, more than with any book I've read for quite some time, I feel as though the events of the book are my own memories and the characters people that I've known. So maybe that's why I say it is a book about childhood, growing up, the world changing: because those are the universal themes in it that made its particular moments so relatable. I've been trying to think of a book to compare Fortress of Solitude to, but it's different than the fiction I usually read and love. There are aspects of the book that remind me of some of the Faulkner I've read; particularly Light in August. The settings and characters of Faulkner's work are quite different, but both books derive their beauty from close observations of a collection of moments in their characters' lives, moments that don't always directly lead from one to another, but rather gather together into a document of memories and images. The pleasu

Lethem's book is as close to a masterpiece as any American fiction of the last few years. His power to create a world -- the world of Dean Street in Gowanus-gentrifying-into-Boerum-Hill as seen through the eyes of Dylan and the others on the block -- gives the narrative of childhood and adolescence a resonance rare in contemporary novels. Lethem gets it all perfectly right: the rhythms, sights, sounds of Brooklyn and Manhattan in the 70s and later. Whether it's the birth of "tagging" (graffiti), hip-hop, or the punk scene at CBGB; the competing visions of gentrification; the slow-motions horrors of teenhood without mothers and with remote, self-absorbed fathers; the seemingly immutable bounds of social class and race -- the novel rarely falters. Lethem's take on various superhero comics, soul artists, and pop-culture references are always on target. But the larger picture -- the love of a world that contains innumerable contradictions and a lot of pain -- is what comes through. If you knew Brooklyn when Brooklyn was the whole world, this book will give you special pleasure, but I can't imagine any reader not being stirred by it, despite some of the book's more messy, sprawling moments. A terrific novel.