Customer Reviews

The Fortress of Solitude

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(29)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

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.

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.

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

Fortress of Solitude is a good book that falls somewhere in between the worlds of My Fractured Life and Atonement. There are some pacing issues, but the good elements exceed the slow ones and it is definitely a fine book.

This is probably a better book than I give it credit for. I've spoken before about how much I dislike passive protagonists and books that value a detached, nihilistic atmosphere over story, and this book is a good example of both. The basic outlines of Lethem's story are gripping; a young white boy grows up in a racially conflicted area of Brooklyn during the 1970s, and finds common ground with a young black schoolmate and their mutual admiration of tagging and comic books. I mention tagging first because many reviews of this book don't mention it, and give the impression that comic books are the main theme of the book. By far, the main obsession and gestalt of this book is graffiti. That's not a slight, but by not mentioning it the reviews and blurbs I've seen are guilty of a disservice. Graffiti was a ubiquitous sight in the New York of the 1970s, and perhaps also a large part of Lethem's young life. The scenes dealing with the mechanics and emotions surrounding this activity far outshine those dealing with comics, or the random cruelties of New York's public school system, or indeed anything else in the book. It's thus a shame that this book wasn't at least slightly illustrated; if it were it would be a fantastic fictionalized history of the phenomenon. As it is, it left me a bit cold and unfulfilled at the end.

Boy, I was expecting to really like this book, going into it. The first few pages are packed full of excerpts from gushing reviews from all kinds of reputable sources. Not to mention that it promised to be a book about Brooklyn, graffiti tagging, comic books ... what's not to like, right? Well, unfortunately, in the end I found it merely "OK" and at times downright trying to trudge through.

Though others have described The Fortress of Solitude as "ambitious," "poetic," and all sorts of other grandiose adjectives, as I read it I saw it a little differently. To me it was a book trying desperately to be ambitious, struggling to rise to the level of poetry while being saddled with a writer who, unfortunatley, doesn't quite have the tools yet.

Lethem's prose is full of overblown similes and metaphors that just don't fit with the subject matter. Overall his style gives this otherwise gritty, urban novel the histrionic tone of a period romance. Time and time again I was pulled out of my enjoyment of the narrative by his hamfisted attempts at "great writing," seemingly unaware that great writing is more than just a coat of paint that you can slap onto a book to wow the crowd.

For me, though, this book's worst sin was in being that particularly unpleasant pill to swallow: a thinly-diguised memoir written by a white male in his late 20s to early 30s. I absolutely despised David Egger's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and when this book started to veer into that territory it almost succeeded in making me hate it, too. Almost.

A word of advice to future late 20s, early 30s writers: Nobody cares about your life. They don't care because you haven't actually done anything yet worth hearing about.

The main character, Dylan Edbus, comes off as just such a self-absorved, navel-gazing stereotype that he's hard to stick with. This slim paperback is actually over 500 pages long, which makes it difficult, because you don't actually want to be around Dylan that much.

Reading the narrative of his early life, I found myself internally nodding and going "yeah, yeah, I get it." And then I could imagine Dylan getting more shrill with the telling, waving his hands around: No, don't you see? I grew up in this neighborhood in Brooklyn, right? Only see, I was white, right? Most of those other guys were black. Oh but wait how could you get it? Because you weren't there. Well let me tell you, I was there. And get this. I had this friend, right? And my friend, he was black.

Well gee, Dylan. Pardon me a moment while I grab some popcorn. I can tell this is going to be fascinating.

Part of the problem is that, for a guy who wants to tell you all about everything he's been through, Dylan doesn't strike me as being particularly observant. Just when you think the childhood bully who tormented Dylan is going to be revealed as a three-dimensional character, Lethem instead kills him off -- his death becomes a kind of catharsis point of the novel, as if this poor guy was actually not just a kid from the block but ... a super-villain?

Dylan/Lethem seems to have even less insight into the other characters. The supposed best friend around whom most of the story revolves is never revealed in any particular way. You don't really get the impression that the two were much friends at all. Another childhood friend (a white kid) returns later in Dylan's life and Dylan reacts to him vindictively, for who he is but specifically because he remembers that, as a kid, the guy would never remain loyal to either the Mets or the Yankees. WTF?? Overall he is describing these characters as a complete outsider, which, given the subject matter -- a white kid living amongst blacks -- makes for a slightly uncomfortable sensation, as if you're reading travel writing from a trip to the ghetto.

By late in the story, Dylan's college years, you are forced to the conclusion that TFoS is a book about a guy who got picked on as a kid and grew up to be a stunted, introverted, asocial adult. Maybe hence the title? But while this might be unpalatable material on its own, it's compounded by the fact that Dylan doesn't seem to realize it. Cue the typical twentysomething college memoir I mentioned earlier: Dylan going to college, Dylan wowing his classmates with his "otherness" (I lived in Brooklyn man, my friend was black, I was there!), Dylan's clumsy romantic entanglements, Dylan reminiscing about Brooklyn, Dylan bravely deciding he must return home, to his roots ... seriously, somebody needs to slap this guy upside his head, just to let him know there's a world past the end of his nose.

Then there's the "magical realism" element -- Dylan and his friend find a magic ring that gives the wearer super powers. At first you're not sure if it's a put-on, but by the end of the book you realize you're expected to treat this as actual fact and it's integral to the resolution of the plot. Does it work? Not in the least. Like all the laborious similes and analogies, this is another affectation Lethem should have saved for a writers' workshop or a college course, or simply left in the toolbox until he understood how to use it.

So is TFoS a bad book? Nah, not really. I would call it a valiant effort, just not the book it wanted to be and not the great book so many want to describe it as. Maybe if I was a New Yorker I would see it differently. Maybe there really aren't enough books that try to conjure 1970s Brooklyn, and there's a nostalgia market for those. Unfortunately, this book for me came off feeling like the awkward first novel so many writers produce and which so often (rightly) gets left on a shelf, unpublished. I hope Lethem has gotten it out of his system and I'll be interested to see what he does next. Hopefully he will no longer feel the need to try quite so desperately hard.

This book is everything in the kitchen sink and more. It lacks narrative structure, fluidity, restraint, cohesion. It seems Lethem found himself drowning in material and lost focus. The second half of the book falls completely to pieces. The choices the author made verge on the ludicrous. Critics may call it post-modern, but post-modern is not synonymous with messy. Sure Lethem mixes genres, but is that really a virtue? Only if the result stands on its own as something unique and compelling, and this does not. The book does hold together and does not deserve the praise its been getting. The excerpt in the New Yorker was the best part. Read that and save yourself the expense of buying the 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 second half of the book is good stuff, solid, interesting, if not disjointed. In fact, the only thing that really drags the novel down is Lethem's (habitual?) need to add a small dose of unreality. In this case, the "weird" of the book concerns a small ring that bestows superpowers onto its wearer. Lethem uses the ring to make a few (sometimes) obvious and (occasionally) intriguing points about life and hopes and dreams. It's kind of cool, a tad interesting, but mostly it's just distracting. Lethem goes to such sublimely strenuous lengths to make his tale authentic to its time; then he introduces this supernatural element, and the characters treat it as a mildly curious but easily dismissable anomaly.

But, hey, that's Lethem, treating the weird as if it were no more or less out of place than anything else. While it might scar his otherwise sweet and sterling story, it also acts as evidence that Lethem is never completely willing to succumb to the cranky rules of reality (even that of his own childhood) or to the stuffy expectations that are usually part and parcel with coming-of-age novels such as this one. Even if it soars like its own kind of crippled superhero, this novel is ten times as ambitious, and every bit as amazing.

I was really loving this book and recommending it to people through the first half of the book. But when the point of view changed to first person halfway through I lost interest. I finished it though. This book could have been a lot shorter, although thats easy for me to say, I didn't have to wrap it up.

I agree that there were really no likable characters left at the the end, which was too bad because the first half really had me pulling for these guys and thinking about them between readings.

I think the writing is fantastic and the author is very talented. Friends have recommended Motherless Brooklyn as a superior book to this and I will seek that out and read it. I am glad I read it but almost didn't finish it just out of spite, I was so disappointed with it near the end. Like the guy at the movie pitch says, there are some problems with the Third Act.

Amen.

Brooklyn. The name floats constantly in the air, calling to hipsters of all ages from across the globe. As a resident of Washington, D.C., I have seen numerous people I know move there, some returning to Washington, some staying behind on that distant island to the north with its beckoning neighborhoods -- Bed-Stuy, Park Slope, Williamsburg. Just as Manhattan was once (and still is) the source of all-consuming New York City naval gazing, Brooklyn has now seized its own chunk of the self-obsessed NYC mantle. "Brooklyn is the new Manhattan," Ted Danson's editor character told Jason Schwartzman's Jonathan Ames character on the HBO series, Bored to Death. Sadly, it was only half a joke.

Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude is perhaps the gold standard for Brooklyn narcissism. It follows the story of Dylan Ebdus, a white kid whose parents were part of the early wave of gentrification in the 1970's, Fortress of Solitude is about how contemporary Brooklyn came to be than it is how Dylan Ebdus grew into adulthood there. Long and rambling, most chapters serve to celebrate some aspect of Brooklyn's history, painting the city with obtuse sentences that sound good as they roll into the brain from the page (or in my case, my Kindle), but when considered for too long hardly make a bit of sense.

Just as race relations and gentrification are the sources of modern Brooklyn's conflicts (one need look no further than Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing to see that gentrification has long been a concern for the borough), race relations inform the central plot of the novel. Dylan, being a living racial experiment for his Utopian mother, is the one white boy in a black neighborhood and black public school. Thus he is bullied and harassed for his whiteness by a sea of faceless black children. With the exception of his friend Mingus Rude, most black characters in the early part of the novel are pretty much the same character -- a dehumanized other who exist solely to "yoke" Dylan for pocket change. If anything, Dylan's experience is a reflection of white anxiety more so than the reality of race relations. Dylan's experience is, I think, oversimplified and stereotypical. The reality of minority whites in a majority black city is much more complex -- as a father with children in a D.C. public charter school, I can say with some authority that the brutalization of Dylan's daily life does not reflect the reality my daughters see every day in our city. As a human being, I'm offended by the simplification of many of the book's black characters.

Dylan drifts through the tumultuous 1970's reading Marvel comics, seeing the emergence of disco, punk and hip hop, and incongruously receiving a magic ring from a flying homeless man. Literature enthusiasts will no doubt enjoy the "magical realism" of this ring, which is barely explained and may not actually be real. But as a longtime reader of fantasy, particularly contemporary "slipstream" fantasy that has its own literary ambitions, I have to say that Lethem handles the ring rather clumsily. It seems incredibly out of place in Dylan's bildungsroman, and does not help the sprawling, unfocused narrative.

In the end, Fortress of Solitude became a chore to finish -- as my enthusiasm waned, I found it harder and harder to get through its pages. Perhaps if I aspired to one day move to Brooklyn, I would have had a different experience with the novel -- but as I have no affection for that magical borough, I can confidently say that this book is not for me, or others not already enamored with it.