The Fortress of Solitude
by Jonathan Lethem
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jonathan LethemEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-08-24
ISBN: 0375724885
Number of pages: 528
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The Fortress of Solitude
Book Review: Unfortunately, mostly navel-gazing
Summary: 3 Stars
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.
Summary of The Fortress of Solitude
The Fortress of Solitude is the story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. It?s a neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along with games of stoopball. In that world, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. As Lethem follows the knitting and unraveling of their friendship, he creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory. The Fortress of Solitude is the first great urban coming of age novel to appear in years.Literary Books
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