The Fortress of Solitude [Paperback]

The real star of this book is not Dylan Ebdus or Mingus Rude but the world that they inhabit. Dean Street in the Seventies is a world teetering in the edge – drugs are rife, the yuppies are moving in, gang life proliferates, and a sense of economic decline permeates the area. To is credit, Lethem’s descriptions of Dean Street are good – the oil stained body shops and forlorn graffitied warehouses, the sprays of broken glass on the side walks, the Puerto Ricans, the images of the dilapidated brownstones, and the liquor stores. This, after all, is the Seventies and Lethem, to his credit infuses his narrative with references to pop culture – Logan’s Run, Star Trek, disco hits, cocaine, and the grooviest pop groups. Lethem periodically intersperses the narrative with pop songs of the period, as the story gradually moves forward into the 80’s and 90’s.

The main problem that I found with this novel is that Lethem never really allows us access to the main characters’ inner thoughts. We have some wonderful descriptions of time and place – but I never got the sense that the author was privileging us to what Mingus, Dylan and Arthur were actually thinking, and this is also true of many of the secondary characters. The reader is constantly the observer on in this novel, always on the outside and at all times looking in. On the positive side, Lethem has a good ear for recreating natural conversation and portrays rather adroitly the particular black inflections of the period. Bu generally though, I found this novel to be a big disappointment, an over the top, shoddy, and slapdash mess. Fortress of Solitude is all over the place, which is a pity, because Lethem has much passion and zeal as a writer.

Michael

You don't have to know anything about 70s soul or Brooklyn street culture to love this book. Brooklyn and its jive-talk, and comic-strip heroes, are merely the framework for universal themes of how we use private myths to deal with reality and to fight our way out of our own ghettos. But it's a rich and compelling cultural background nevertheless. Forget about the "great American novel" (what is this obsession? did Dostoevsky set out to write the "great Russian novel" or did he just need to write?) - Lethem can just as well be compared to Joyce in the musicality of his language, and to Spenser in his use of dualities. Jung readers will find plenty of interest in here too.

Who before has dared to make the white kid the victim, not ultimately of black racism but of society's compulsion to outcast difference?

Mammoth though it is, I found this book's structure revealed itself and its dénouement successfully ties in all its strands and myths. You have to like metaphor and signs as a way of reading the world - here they show their primeval force in a dog-eat-dog urban morass. If you liked The Corrections chances are you'll hate this. But to some it will speak out loud and clear.

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