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Title: The Fortress of Solitude : A Novel by JONATHAN LETHEM ISBN: 0-385-50069-6 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.04 (52 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Though a bit slow at times, this is a compelling read
Comment: Jonathan Lethem loves language and it shows. Writers who use beautiful descriptions and show a deep understanding of words can make any story more interesting. This is certainly true of THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE. While the book seemed slow and too deliberate in some places, the author's skill kept me reading. Lethem's MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN might deserve the description tour de force, and GUN, WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC showed lots of imagination.
I'm usually not interested in stories of boys growing up, but Lethem made me pay attention to this one. There are reminders here of everything from THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY by Michael Chabon to Steve Kluger's LAST DAYS OF SUMMER --- about growing up in New York in the '50s, '60s and '70s, friendships, and figuring out the codes of childhood.
We meet Dylan Ebdus, who is adored by his mother, at the age of five. Unfortunately the mother, a potentially major character, leaves the scene fairly early in the book. Alexander Ebdus, Dylan's father, is a slightly obsessed artist who for a long time never seems to know he has a son who could use his attention. Alexander ends up as a cover artist for science fiction paperbacks, which makes him more interesting to me --- in part because, while there is no Hugo for "Best New Artist," an award Alexander wins, I'm very familiar with the Hugo Awards and there is even one in my house (though it's not mine).
Dylan seems to slide through much of life. Mingus, the aware hip black kid, befriends him. This takes courage --- Dylan doesn't have anything unique to offer, and in their neighborhood in Brooklyn, black kids have the edge on things that are hip and cool. Time and again, their friendship saves Dylan from uncomfortable situations. He soon develops an odd fascination with becoming a superhero, taken over by Mingus; it's a strong subplot that gives a slightly otherworldly feel to this otherwise straightforward story.
Lethem does a very nice job of mixing the real world with his imaginary one. I often stopped to try to remember a record, an event, or a school before realizing that that one wasn't real. There are markers along the way of musical and political events. I thought Lethem's markers of funk music and graffiti tagging were a little too superficial in the scheme of black and white differences in the last fifty years. This isn't to say that Lethem's story is stereotypical. However, Dylan succeeds while Mingus is doomed; Dylan is encouraged to go to a magnet high school (even as his father seems oblivious to it all), but Mingus slides by and falls into drugs and oblivion, in no small part thanks to his father's drug habits.
When Lethem writes at his best, he takes you completely into his fictional world. The "Liner Notes" section, which brings you up-to-date, is wonderfully written, albeit too long. But you believe you heard all those R&B and soul songs that Barrett Rude Jr. sang with "The Subtle Distinctions" (I love that name).
However, I never quite got a handle on Dylan. I saw much of him through a scrim, never quite connecting. Dylan doesn't seem to develop much definition over the years. He has few passions or strong beliefs. I was compelled to read every beautifully written word, although I don't think I've ever met a character who seemed so lost about his life. The book trails off at the end, confused like its main character. I read all 450 plus pages in two days. I'm just not completely sure why.
--- Reviewed by Andi Shechter
Rating: 4
Summary: An embarrassment of riches.
Comment: In one of the most ambitious novels in recent memory, Jonathan Lethem recreates the sights, sounds, textures, and tensions of one block of Dean Street in Brooklyn from the 1970's to the present. Dylan Ebdus, the white child of artistic, hippie parents, and his best friend, Mingus Rude, the son of a cocaine-addicted black singer, face school and neighborhood dangers together. Their world of spaldeens, skully, stickball, wallball, and stoopball exists side by side with the bullying, shakedowns, and outright theft which Dylan must face every day on walks to his school, "a cage for growing, nothing else." Together they collect comic books about superheroes, who, unlike them, have the power to conquer injustice and escape from all threats.
Though they admire Spiderman, they do not like Superman, whom they consider a "flattened reality," an ineffective presence living in his "Fortress of Solitude," much like Dylan's artist father living in his studio. When a homeless man in the neighborhood, jumps from a three-story building and injures himself in an attempt to fly like Superman, Dylan begins to think about Superman as a real, not comic book character, actually emulating him in real life. Descriptions of the neighborhood, the attempts at gentrification, the inadequate public school system, the drug scene, the racial conflicts, and eventually even the prison system all add depth and color to the novel, and Lethem expands this scope even further by presenting a detailed view of pop culture. His unique images are a constant source of surprise and delight.
The novel is a huge and imaginative recreation of growing up in the city in the '70's, but it is not seamless. Dylan's early life is traumatic and is drawn very realistically, so the reader is startled when, at the relatively mature age of thirteen, Dylan becomes obsessed with Superman and wants to emulate him, and when the author segues into the magic realism of flight shortly thereafter, the reader is unprepared for the contrast with the earlier naturalism of the novel. Dylan's lack of curiosity about what happens to Mingus after a horrifying incident at age fourteen leaves the reader wondering about the depth of his feelings, and occasionally the mini-essays, which give color and life to the neighborhood, act as a brake on the action. Dylan as an adult is not very interesting, and Mingus becomes almost a footnote. Still the novel adds a new dimension to Lethem's rapidly growing portfolio of outstanding novels and enhances his reputation as one of America's most exciting young novelists. Mary Whipple
Rating: 5
Summary: exceptionally good
Comment: i finished johnathan lethem's "the fortress of solitude" today, and i'm trying to comprehend what he tried to pull off and if in fact he pulled it off. i don't think so, not completely, but he came damned close. the first 300 pages are near perfect, but the last 200, while hugely enjoyable and totally readable, wobble, especially the last 50, where lethem may have tried too hard. but god bless him for trying. and, as i said, he almost manages it. god bless him for that too.
it is an amazing book in many ways, a junk drawer full of childhood memories, circa the mid- to late-1970s, specific to brooklyn but in many ways universal. it's a knowing, unblinking look at race relations and friendship and music (especially music!) and puberty and drugs and pretty much anything else you can name. the friendship between the white dylan (a product of liberal guilt) and the black mingus (a product of the streets that liberal guilt could never fix) is heartbreaking and feels right and real. the language is straightforward except when it's startlingly poetic, but still absolutely right, not flashy, not a conceit.
but, amid all the grime and the crime and the growing-up stuff in the book's first half and the remembering and the regret and the emotional paralysis in its second half, there is a subplot that at first i couldn't accept that lethem meant to be taken at face value. yet there it was, with no apologies. we are asked to believe that over the course of 30 years, the boys, mad about comic books in their youth, share possession of a ring that allows them, sort of, to first fly like a superhero, then, more successfully, to disappear. try as i might to convince myself these were purely symbolic acts, i finally had to accept the fact that people do fly here, in brooklyn and beyond, except when they don't, crash-landing with varying, ultimately lethal results.
it doesn't quite work in the final analysis. but it comes oh-so-close. and in a way the "failure" doesn't matter. the first two-thirds of "the fortress of solitude" are so spectacularly, achingly successful that nothing that could happen in the final third - which also is very strong despite the unexpected aeronautics - would make this anything other than an exceptionally good, okay great - there i've said it - novel.
i recommend it.
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