The Fortress of Solitude

published	2005 by Faber and Faber
binding	Paperback
isbn	0571219357 (isbn13: 9780571219353)
pages	160
literary awards	2005 IMPAC Dublin Award Nominee
description	This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their fri...more [close] This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification." This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most simple human decisions—what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch money—are laden with potential political, social and racial disaster. This is the story of 1990s America, when no one cared anymore. This is the story of punk, that easy white rebellion, and crack, that monstrous plague. This is the story of the loneliness of the avant-garde artist and the exuberance of the graffiti artist. This is the story of what would happen if two teenaged boys obsessed with comic book heroes actually had superpowers: They would screw up their lives. This is the story of joyous afternoons of stickball and dreaded years of schoolyard extortion. This is the story of belonging to a society that doesn't accept you. This is the story of prison and of college, of Brooklyn and Berkeley, of soul and rap, of murder and redemption. This is the story Jonathan Lethem was born to tell. This is THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE. From the Hardcover edition. [close]
date added	12-13-06 edit book

find at: Amazon | Half.com | Barnes & Noble | Abebooks | more...

discuss this book

topics	replies	last activity
White people from afam neighborhoods and race relations.	1	04/04/2008 09:05PM

new topic

groups with this book

friend reviews (0)

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

lists with this book

Superhero Fiction

11 books | 2 voters

More...

other reviews (showing 1-20 of 4075)

Garth rated it:

(review of isbn 0385500696)

09/22/07

Read in October, 2003

"First, a confession: I approached Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude with high expectations--not impossibly high, but perhaps high enough to bias my reaction to the novel. I first learned that a new Lethem book was forthcoming from a contributor’s note in Harper’s, where Lethem this spring published a wonderful essay on the nearly forgotten critic Edward Dahlberg. I added “The Fortress of Solitude-September” to the weird little list I keep of titles to look out for. Then,...more "First, a confession: I approached Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude with high expectations--not impossibly high, but perhaps high enough to bias my reaction to the novel. I first learned that a new Lethem book was forthcoming from a contributor’s note in Harper’s, where Lethem this spring published a wonderful essay on the nearly forgotten critic Edward Dahlberg. I added “The Fortress of Solitude-September” to the weird little list I keep of titles to look out for. Then, toward the end of summer, an excerpt appeared in the New Yorker. I was so taken with what I read of “View from a Headlock” that I stopped halfway through, hoping to save some of the piece’s surprises for when the novel itself was published. I extended my self-imposed media blackout to reviews, as well—no mean feat for an inveterate book-review browser.

This may all seem a little much for a novelist whose last book, the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Motherless Brooklyn, I didn’t even like that much. But I got the impression from his recent nonfiction that, in The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem would be swinging for the fences.
In recent years, a number of American white guys have abandoned the comfortable climes of the modest triumph and the minor setback—where most novelists eventually settle—and lit out for the territory where the magnum opus roams—where the ground is littered with the bones of pretenders. I’m thinking here of DeLillo, Chabon, Franzen, Roth, Eugenides, Gass, Cormac McCarthy, Russell Banks (one might also include Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, and even Thomas Pynchon in this list). This has not been a wholly welcome development: the fin de siecle trend toward big-ass books of balls-out ambition has distracted some writers from their own best tendencies, and from the point-of-view of women and writers of color, the whole thing may call to mind a pissing contest, for which Tom Wolfe’s unconvincing polemics may be to blame. But while the degree of success has varied from author to author, the peculiar resurgence of the Great American Novel—on the brink of extinction by the early 1970s—has made being a reader in America in recent years a bracing, invigorating experience.

In order to write these long, sweeping novels, each of the authors I’ve mentioned, seems to have drawn on his own history and passions in a way he hadn’t before. In particular, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Middlesex, and The Corrections raised the stakes on their authors’ careers, so that Chabon and Eugenides and Franzen will either be remembered as big-time novelists or as big, overhyped failure. Now, I sensed, it was Lethem’s turn. Motherless Brooklyn had proven his abilities as a stylist and his “sense of place” (to borrow from Eudora Welty), but had ultimately failed to move me. The Fortress of Solitude would reveal just what Lethem was capable of.

In a way, I was right. The novel, equal parts memoir, comic book, and meditation on race, traces the friendship of its white protagonist, Dylan Edbus, and his black best friend and idol, Mingus Rude, through 25 years of history. There are moments, in particular those set in Lethem’s exquisitely felt Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, when the author indeed seems to summon all the energies of mind and heart and hand to create an utterly convincing emotional reality. Just as often, however, Lethem lapses, offering scenes that feel overplotted, overwritten, and underwhelming. It seems to me that the source of much of the novel’s unevenness lies an unresolved tension that has often been debated over on The Millions, one we might call “the trouble with realism.”...

You can read my complete review at hace.blogspot.com...less

Like this review? yes (2 people liked it)