The Fortress of Solitude [Import] [Paperback]

Jonathan Lethem (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; First British Edition edition (2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571219349
• ISBN-13: 978-0571219346
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (120 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,568,011 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jonathan Lethem was born in New York and attended Bennington College.

He is the author of seven novels including Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which was named Novel of the Year by Esquire and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Salon Book Award, as well as the Macallan Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger.

He has also written two short story collections, a novella and a collection of essays, edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, guest-edited The Year's Best Music Writing 2002, and was the founding fiction editor of Fence magazine.

His writings have appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, McSweeney's and many other periodicals.

He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book I've read in years, May 31, 2005

By 

Sarah Kowalski (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fortress of Solitude: A Novel (Hardcover)

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 pleasure of reading Fortress of Solitude comes mostly from the almost cinematic experience of envisioning its sensual descriptions of a life. If you're finding it slow going, I'd suggest just giving it some time; it's a hard book to get into in 15-minute increments. I found it beautifully written but not particularly compelling at the beginning; I think I put it down for about a week before starting up again. But for me, it was well worth the effort to get into; by the end, I couldn't put it down, and I've been talking about it ever since.

64 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars strong moments overshadowed by weaker ones and pace, December 15, 2003

By 

B. Capossere (Rochester, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fortress of Solitude: A Novel (Hardcover)

There are some beautiful moments in the Fortress of Solitude--moments of crystalline description, of poetic evocation of time and place, moments of heartbreaking human interaction. But for me, these moments just didn't hold together long enough or happen often enough.
The novel follows Dylan Ebdus, known as "whiteboy" to those around him on Dean Street due to the rarity of his skin color, as he grows up and out of the Brooklyn neighborhood. While we see Dylan from five through middle-age, most of the book focuses on his young teen years and especially his friendship with Mingus Rude, a friendship which goes on and off through the years. Both boys are motherless. Dylan's liberal-minded mother has left him to his painter father who has given up a promising artist career to work obsessively on an abstract painting on film while Mingus lives with his father, Barret Junior--a once-famous singer who spirals into drugs and obscurity. Both fathers threaten to take their children down with them, both father try to rise out of their depths.
Other main characters include another young white boy even further down the junior and high school hierarchy than Dylan and a street tough who is a running physical and psychological threat to Dylan over the years.
Many have lauded the evocation of 1970's Brooklyn--the poetic recreation of that world of stickball and skully and comic books and stoopball and gentrification. And there is, as mentioned, some truly amazing writing put to that purpose. But for all the loving detail, it never felt intimate enough to evoke much feeling to me. Some of the pop references felt like set pieces or throw-away time markers, some sections were overly long and others not long enough, some had powerful emotive effects (the section of skully for instance) and others seemed recitation of cold descriptive facts.
Part of the problem was that the characters never truly felt fully-formed or real to me, especially Mingus, so I cared even less about the setting. A lot of time is spent on early Dylan to good effect but he starts to pale as a character as the book goes on and is not particularly likable or more importantly interesting as an adult. Mingus is too often too removed (both literally and figuratively) and therefore too many of the character "tags" associated with him--graffiti, drug use, drug dealing--have the feel of cliche rather than character development. The other white boy, Arthur, I found too often simply unbelievable in his speech, which was too bad since it was a distraction from his actions, which could have had much more of an emotional impact had I accepted him as a person.
The magical-realism part involving a ring which can supposedly make the wearer fly or invisible among other powers dependent upon its user, feels a bit forced and uneven; it intervenes clumsily at times, more effectively at others. The same is true of the comic book motif which moves from painfully belabored to beautifully evocative of desire and loneliness and despair and power.
Overall, the book just didn't hold together for me. It was too episodic in nature without adding up to a whole greater than its parts and the characters were just not fully formed enough for me to care despite the plot's weaknesses and uneven pace. The best section for me was the middle, past the first 100 pages or so. I was tempted several times in those first 100 to put it down, and even more so once Dylan moved into his older teens and on to college then adulthood, but the potential and the occasional gem of a sentence or paragraph or several pages would keep me going through the next rough patch, which is why I gave it a three. Ultimately though, its strengths were overshadowed by its weaknesses and I finished unsure if I would have been better off giving into the temptation to quit earlier.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A mighty but flawed dirge, October 30, 2003

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fortress of Solitude: A Novel (Hardcover)

I'm in two minds about this book. On the one hand I'm conflicted about the novel's style and structure, yet on the other hand I'm in absolute awe of its enormous scope and passion. Fortress of Solitude was just far too over embellished with detail and Lethem's style just seemed out of control. Lethem really needed a good editor to ferret out some of the more long-winded passages, rein his style in, and condense the novel to a more sensible length. Much of Fortress of Solitude is satisfactory for its insight into the sights and sounds of Brooklyn in the 1970's, yet its also frustrating in its intensity. Lethem writes as though he is obsessed with some "Joycean" like force, as though he can't wait to splurge and gorge any thought he ever had onto the printed page. He has a kind of bold, confrontational style, but his work reads like a clunky, turgid school report from his youth.

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 - the movie 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. But generally though, I found this novel to be a big disappointment, and 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