The first half of this book is the best thing I've read in years. The stories of Dylan Ebdus growing up in Brooklyn, dealing with racism and graffiti and superpowers, were amazing. I couldn't put the book down. I loved it.

But then the timeline jumps forward into the 90s. Instead of a shy middle-school student, or a punk poseur teenager, Dylan is a whiny rock journalist in 1999. That's not the book I want to read. I don't care about his problems with his girlfriend or efforts to pitch a movie deal. The sudden change in focus, and the switch from 3rd to 1st person, made me feel like I was reading a different book. A much worse book.

Once I got over my disappointment at the change in the second half, and my desire to stop reading entirely, I found it wasn't all bad. There were some flashbacks to Dylan's time in college, which I enjoyed. And the ending was interesting. I'm still giving the book 4 stars because I loved the first half so much, but I'm disappointed by it overall.

fanculo jonathan lethem. mi hai tirato una spaldeen imprendibile e mi hai definitivamente fregato con quelle sciagurate 100 pagine finali. sono qui col tuo libro tra le mani, spiegazzato lui e ammaccata io. gli angoli rovinati come la morsa dietro lo sterno, dove hai colpito forte con l'ultimo lancio. pensare che nei giorni scorsi (arrivata al famoso calo di tono su cui peraltro ero stata allertata: facendo sterile ragioneria potrei dire a 1/3, o forse 2/5 dalla fine o giù di lì) ho perfino ipotizzato che la quinta stella non l'avrei accesa. come diavolo ho fatto, non lo so. del resto eri partito benissimo, con una duecentina di pagine filate a farmi ripetere: ecco cosa verrebbe fuori se mark twain tornasse per riscrivere un huckleberry finn più amaro e con un doping conclamato di fumetti marvel. con un film alla spike lee nella testa (uno brooklyniano pesante tipo fai la cosa giusta) e un bagno di cultura pop che crea sostrato comune con ogni infanzia, non importa se tirata su a migliaia di chilometri e situazioni di distanza. e amen se non ero troppo sul pezzo circa il copioso fraseggio di musica '70 e '80. mi bastava sentire fino in fondo cosa significasse una canzone come «play that funky music (white boy)» dei wild cherry per dylan vorrei-la-pelle-nera ebdus. il ragazzino che cresce nella brooklyn degli anni settanta subendo un razzismo al negativo, ma stringendo anche quello che resterà a dispetto di tutto il legame più vero della sua vita. sto facendo casino, me ne rendo conto. ma forse è più giusto così, perché il vago senso di sopraffazione è lo stesso che ho avuto in background durante lunghi tratti della lettura. col dubbio che, da un momento all'altro, per gestire tutte quelle emozioni mi sarebbe servito un manuale di assemblaggio [e io non leggo mai le istruzioni di alcunché]. e invece no. mentre mi chiedevo quale versione di kryptonite narrativa avrei trovato nella stanza più interna della fortezza (il titolo del romanzo è citazione da superman, sì), che mi avrebbe steso o ferito gravemente, tutto ha iniziato a incastrarsi da sé. è come se anche lethem al settimo giorno si fosse riposato. sei lì che leggi e scopri di avere tra le mani una maionese che temevi stesse per impazzire e invece eccola riuscire a meraviglia. o un lillången dell'ikea (mobile base per lavabo con due ante, sifone e ripiano regolabile inclusi) che si monta da solo mentre sei pronto a sacramentare sulla brugola e i sostegni angolari. lethem si prende la briga di mettere tutto al posto giusto, anche se come accade per i grandi romanzi la perfezione non è affar suo. e allora è vero che il libro ha talune lungaggini che mi hanno tentato con la famosa diagonalità, ma puntualmente ecco nuovi squarci in cui capisci che l'unica cosa che vuoi è lasciarti trasportare. abbandonarti a un romanzo che parla dell'amicizia, del rapporto coi genitori o con la loro assenza, delle circostanze che ci fanno diventare quello che siamo [e non siamo mai davvero le belle persone che il pubblico pagante si aspettava che] e di come la fantasia può dare l'illusione di essere altrove o altrimenti, ma nello stesso tempo aiutarti a restare dove sei. e fa male e fa bene, allora, avere conferma che più un'infanzia è dura più una parte di noi tornerà sempre lì. la fidanzata di dylan glielo rinfaccia più o meno con queste parole, non ho preso nota della frase ma il succo c'è. come c'è una fortezza della solitudine in cui si prova a regolare dei conti, con se stessi prima che con la vita. ma non ci si riesce quasi mai, lethem lo sa e ce lo dice in chiarezza. e insomma c'è tanta di quella roba in questo romanzo che vale il prezzo di almeno un altro biglietto. e non mi riferisco né al numero delle pagine né ai riferimenti reali di cui quel furbastro di un hipster infittisce le bislacche partogenesi della sua fantasia. anzi, l'unico appunto che muovo forse a lethem è un eccesso di riferimenti nella ricostruzione ambientale (namedropping nostalgico dei consumi culturali d'epoca?) che è anche il motivo per cui penso sia uno strafare tener google a portata di dito mentre si legge. credo semmai che il modo migliore di godersi questo romanzo immenso sia non incarognirsi sui dettagli e volare più in alto. remove before flight. perché lethem è ufficialmente Uno Che Sa Tirare Una Spaldeen Di Sguincio.

Lethem plunges straight into a blistering narrative, smacking up the breakneck prose with childhood patois. It’s choppy, quick, staccatoed with sizzling similes and crackshot chains of short descriptors that fizzle and glow like miniature, backlit ships in bottles. Dozens of characters are tipped onto the page in a scattering of Polaroid snaps. As fast as the streets of Brooklyn and New York, they appear and, as arbitrarily, they fade away.

There’s no time for dwelling or introspection - stuff is happening to a lot of people at the same time. No quarter given. Pay attention or get left behind.

Jump cuts pile on top of one another. Scenes within scenes. Lethem is writing at 60 frames a second as if he’s a Southside Ellmore, the centrifugal force sucking in some New Yorker and Chabon golden moments.

Breathless, descriptive, sparse yet rich in incident, he almost hypnotises - aided and inspired by a unique, quirky, slacker vernacular which sparks and bristles with a relentless series of ice-cool, alternate dimension metaphors. For instance, ‘the air smelled like somebody’s arm up close’. Or else, describing a stinking hot, inner city day he observes that the, ‘cars moved like jellyfish, barely distinguishable from their medium, a ripple where the tar met the air.’

Natty phrasing executed in pointillist detail, each frame painted by hand, where you just know the author has smiled, a little bit smug, knowing he’s IN CHARGE, in control of what he’s writing. Funky, askew shorthand that’s easy to parody but impossible to invent.

Impressive, pit of the stomach, machine gun prose suits the time and place he’s portraying – 1970s in the projects – through the eyes of an ostracized child. Style, voice, tone, content and pacing all perfectly aligned like a wonky bike wobbling furiously down a Brooklyn street, fit for purpose, at pace, flashes of freestyle brilliance compensating for the frequent crashes. The sense of place permeates every word. It reeks of it.

It’s a similar bravura performance to ‘Random Acts of Senseless Violence’ where the dialogue and brogue, that ceaseless patter, propel the book forward: the power lies in the metaphors, the quirkiness, the cavalcade of characters and the raw energy.

The edit is all here. A Hollywood edit – 20 cuts a minute. No dolly shots. A quick master, a brief nod to establishing a scene, and then a swift succession of moments and sights and sounds. Instantaneous thoughts appear, burst and are replaced by others.

A clue to the vibe is in the title – Superman’s sanctuary, his Fortress of Solitude. So a bubblegum jag but with infinite puffy pink squares inside so as soon as one scene runs out of flavour, a fresh one unfolds.

And then, after all that excitement, two thirds of the way through, he ends the childhood section, flicks forward 20-odd years and destroys everything that has gone before. Not in a good way. Lethem goes pedestrian. Maybe he exhausted himself on the sprint. But 300 pages in is hardly the time to break the pace. He’d have already gone through the wall. He could have kept it up. Instead, he totally muffs it.

Something possessed him to veer from sassy pulp fiction with knockout character to tedious frat boy, film and music industry, LA tropes. The child suddenly becomes a very tedious man. Nothing new to see, hear or learn here.

It’s so disappointing, it’s not worth labouring the point. Lethem lands in LA and Brooklyn in 1991, transitioning into a brick wall. The style changes, the mood changes, all of its energy leaks out like a deflated balloon and a 5 star becomes an average, beach read. The kid is now all grown up and bland with bland emotions, bland situations and generally beige.

Some of the music industry stuff is interesting but everything needed far more cowbell. The characters, the prose, the story and the writer all gave up at once for the final 200 pages. None of them could even be bothered to squeeze out a late save in the dying moments despite the glittering mileage built up during the blistering and phenomenal first half.

I felt cheated. Maybe like the characters. Maybe that’s what happens in life.

A beyond bizarre dereliction of duty.

Naughty.

Well, this is the one. If you only read one book this year, read this one. It's devastating, brilliant, all those things the blurbs say it is.

DNF at 44%

Just a little too slow for me. I do recommend the superior and underrated musical (which famously came out the same season at the Public as Hamilton oops)!

Fortress of Solitude depicts a world in which there is no such thing as a responsible adult. It might be deemed a coming of age novel except its two central characters, Dylan (white) and Mingus (black), whom we meet when they are both twelve, never grow up even though by the end of the novel they are both in their thirties. Ironically the impoverished Brooklyn neighbourhood where they live does grow up, does become a responsible adult: by the time Dylan is in his thirties, it has become gentrified. Both Dylan and Mingus have been abandoned by their mothers. Both are brought up by maverick fathers on the same street in the 1970s. Dylan’s safety in the largely hostile black neighbourhood is constantly menaced though his friendship with the streetwise Mingus offers solace and even a little protection.

Whether you love or hate this novel will depend largely on whether or not you warm to Lethem’s virtuoso highly detailed prose style. Sometimes he can make you see the familiar in a new and searing light; other times he has a tendency perhaps to over paint his canvases so detail is obscured in overly mannered intricacies of imagery. On the whole I was full of admiration for Lethem’s wordsmithery. He’s among the boldest writer of sentences of living novelists.

Fortress of Solitude is a brilliant account of boyhood and especially its defining moments of triumph and humiliation which Lethem gives equal resonance to. He doesn’t go overboard with the bullying Dylan endures, the daily humiliation of being “yoked”. It’s also a deft and incredibly sensitive observation of black/white relations in 1970s New York. Mingus especially is a great character and there’s something genuinely moving and ultimately heartbreaking about the friendship Dylan and Mingus share. It’s also a brilliant depiction of urban New York in the 1970 and 80s, especially with regards to the roles played by graffiti and music.

The playful subplot of this novel is a magical ring that enables its wearer to become a superhero. Aeroman. Comics, emblematic of fantasy in general, play a major role in the formation of all the young boys. In the scenes where the ring plays a part Lethem challenges your ability to sustain disbelief to the maximum because otherwise this is a work of gritty realism and probing psychology.

Music is another theme. And especially soul music because this is a novel about soul, the haunted soul unable to quite find its native ground in the world. (Mingus’ father apparently is modelled on Marvin Gaye.)

It’s a much more ambitious novel than Motherless Brooklyn and because of its sprawling nature not, for me, as successful but still a brilliant achievement though it should also be said that the first two thirds is a great deal more engaging and moving than the last third.

Lethem's acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel, TFOS is superbly evocative of the times--1970s Brooklyn; music, comics and other cultural ephemera of the period; drugs and other temptations, black life and culture; and much more. Lethem's dialogue and characters are mostly true to life, and the pages turn quickly. Sometimes one can't help wondering, while reading, what's truth and what's baloney, but there are plenty of places in the book where reality obviously ceases, and fantasy and exaggeration take over, as in other of Lethem's work. But it's all done well, and the result is a moving view of Lethem's youth and ultimate maturation--or was it disillusionment?

I guess I'm all backwards or at least crooked in my approach to Lethem, starting with Chronic City, then Motherless Brooklyn, and now this. Clearly, I haven't read enough of his work to get a sense of how and where each book fits, but this does feel like his Portrait or the Artist. I loved it. I loved the way the nerdy klutzy white kid navigated the world he was born (and half-abandoned) into, and I love the secret power that a homeless man gives him (not just to use but to share), something treated as matter-of-factly as anything else in the story, with so many of those things fantastical enough. I think some of the power of the story bled out with the time compression of getting Dylan to adulthood; Lethem's power is strongest in powerfully detailed scenes, and the day-to-day accounts of him as a kid beat anything or almost anything that happens later. But he is a great story-teller, and he manages the full arc very well, not neatly, but aptly.

So interesting and consuming I forgive any flaws I perceived. The depth of a Victorian novel rich in pop culture detail. The loosely structured plot unfolds like memory. Subplots and references to warm my heart: 70s paperback sci fi cover art and "Another Green World"? Sigh.

The only white dot on a completely black canvas. The white dot trying to hide in a hoody, to fade into the background. That white dot is a boy, Dylan, "yo, white boy" in a completely black neighborhood of Brooklyn in the 80s-90s. A constant victim of teasing and bullying, who just wants to be like everyone else: to have normal friends, to go to school without looking over his shoulder, maybe, to do some stupid boyish thing, to try smoking or drawing graffiti. He finds a sort of a shelter in comics and hopes to become a superhero to finally be free, be stronger, be able to protect similar victims of this unfriendly place. Maybe, he even could be one - only needs a superpower.
His Dean street is an island of imaginary safety, though not completely isolated from the black ghetto. He finds a friend there. Together they form parallel words: almost black and completely white, without mothers, with strange father figures and lots of unfilled spaces. They grow up, sometimes managing to be friends, sometimes falling out. One day they will be teenagers and then men, divided not by their origins, but by choices they make.
Jonathan Lethem describes their lives through the ever-changing prism of Brooklyn in a very poetic, almost song-like, language. If you read it, you might understand that their lives are two green triangles, waiting to fall.
I was reading "The Fortress of Solitude" in bed, before going to sleep and each night I kept reading past the reasonable hour. Somewhat dark but captivating book of personal stories.

What. A. Book.

Lethem could write a novel about paint drying and I'd probably love it, but thankfully this one is much more interesting than that. We follow a young Dylan Ebdus from childhood to adulthood, as well as several other characters that live on his street in Brooklyn.

I enjoyed this one as much as I did his latest novel (as of May 1, 2024) Brooklyn Crime Novel. Both are set primarily in the Dean Street/Boerum Hill Neighborhood and tackle the idea of race relations through the lens of youth to an extent. Both also look at crime, though Fortress concerns itself more indirectly with the idea than Brooklyn Crime Novel. If you like one, you're almost certainly going to like the other.

Fortress is much more direct than BCN, at least in its plot, which I'm sure some readers will prefer to the kaleidoscopic form of the latter, and focuses more on Dylan's journey than simply on the neighborhood, which is less of a character in this one than in BCN.

What I really enjoy about the novel, though, is Lethem's writing. It's clever and witty without trying too hard. Erudite, but not so loftly the reader gets lost in anything but the world he's created.

Highly recommend.

(Hopefully all that makes some sense. I find Lethem's novels difficult to describe. One must simply experience them.)

This is one of those books that if they were published as two separate novels without one being related to the other you'd probably think they were decent works on their own. And while they're still good when put together, its not quite the seamless fit that maybe the author had in mind, although in all fairness that could have been the intent all along.

One thing that's always struck me about reading semi-autobiographical novels about growing up is that if I ever wanted to write one myself I clearly didn't plan ahead and take lots of detailed notes about my childhood and the neighborhood I grew up in. Lethem's written about Brooklyn at least once before (and probably kicked himself for not using that title here) but here he draws upon elements of his childhood to recreate the Brooklyn of the 1970s in such exacting detail that you almost expect to look outside your window and see high gas prices and Nixon still President. Because he haven't hung out in a while I haven't the slightest clue if any of this novel actually happened to him but it really doesn't make any difference, he's not so much recounting as reconstructing, rebuilding a world that stopped existing a long time ago and letting the character inhabit it to see what moves they make.

In that respect the first section of the book is flat out amazing in parts. I've read a number of books that go with the standard "Hey! Kids! Childhood is sure both wonderful and complicated, right?" tactic but Lethem doesn't so much give us a childhood as THIS childhood, the one that belongs to our boy Dylan Edbus, who has moved there with his parents and finds that he's about the only white child in a predominantly black neighborhood. Taking us through the seventies and until Dylan eventually goes to college, he adopts an exuberantly personal approach with prose that seems a few steps below the heady "whee!" fizz of Michael Chabon but with a rhythm that's completely self-assured and packed with detail, bringing you inside all the interlocking parts of the neighborhood and along the way touching on issues of race and gentrification and the best way to play stoopball. He turns the neighborhood into what neighborhoods feel like, a separate world, their own islands that have necessary tangential relationships with the streets around them, where the whole world can change if you go a few blocks away, where stepping off the curb toward another corner might as well be taking a leap toward the moon. He doesn't forget that neighborhoods are made up of people and to that end populates the houses with a set of characters to harass, befriend and mystify Dylan, including his best friend Mingus Rude, the son of a formerly famous soul singer. They bounce off and support each other as the early years go on and they begin to develop along separate paths while still maintaining a bond.

Its the changes both external and internal that make up the momentum of the first section of the book, as not only the boys but the adults around them adapt to the changing nature of both the decade and the neighborhood itself, forcing everyone to move with the times in ways that don't always seem to have "good idea" stamped on them. Through that whole first section Lethem's prose never wavers, churning out period detail after period detail without being overwhelming, giving you the impression of a man who somehow reentered his own childhood or spent a lot of time researching not only how people looked and stood but how they acted and talked, just the general aura of a specific place and time but filtered through the lens of childhood and by someone who is learning that the world is magical and gritty in equal measure although it tends to be the latter that wins out eventually. Its to Lethem's credit that none of this ever becomes cloying or overly nostalgic, there's never a yearning to get back to a simpler time because the book exists in Dylan's moment, and even as his awareness of what the world is really like changes the world itself never does.

If there's any flaws in the first part at all (unless you're allergic to this kind of intensely felt recreation) its that the neighborhood and the people in it are often more interesting than Dylan himself, who no matter what happens or how deeply immersed he is in it seems to exist at a sort of remove from the rest of the novel. Part of that may be a coping mechanism but he's often fairly colorless, becoming more interesting depending on what person is near him and seeming to exist at times as a passive observer that just happens to be the main character. Granted when the cast is this colorful you're going to have to work really hard to stand out but there are moments when you prefer the book be about Mingus or his dad or even Dylan's dad, an avant-garde painter who has to turn to doing garish SF paperback covers to make ends meet (and winds up being highly regarded by a fandom he couldn't care less about) and in his spare time works on a animation project that will never be completed and might as well scream "Metaphor: the Movie". But even so, he's got a little bit of creativity and soul in him, which seems more what Dylan has at times.

The other part that might set people off considering how realistic large parts of the novel are is the boys' discovery of a magic ring that grants powers that may or may not be limited to flight. Its a bit of a jarring note in the novel that at first could be attributed to very active imaginations (and later turning the novel into a variation of "Birdman" crossed with "High Fidelity") but it seems that the book is playing the magic powers as straight as its playing Dylan getting mugged. Its another thing that probably screams out "this is a metaphor for lost innocence!" but it sort of makes things weird every time it appears.

But that isn't as big a problem in the early stages. Its only when the first part climaxes and after a brief break we move into the third part that the novel loses a bit of steam. Switching to a first person style for the most part, we're not following an adult Dylan as a struggling music journalist that lives in California (almost as far away from Brooklyn as you can physically get) and fights with his girlfriend more often than not. Taken out of childhood the prose loses the detail laden sharpness that characterized the early stages and while that's probably a deliberate stylistic choice (like if "The Wizard of Oz" went from color to black and white instead) it does suck some of the life out of the novel especially as Dylan hasn't become more interesting in the interim. In fact, the biggest problem in the novel remains that he's the least interesting person (barring his father's new girlfriend, who is pleasant but seems to exist mostly to be pleasant) in a cast where everyone seems to have a rich inner life but him. His father, Mingus, Mingus' dad, even the white kid who dealt drugs and later contributed to the gentrification of the old neighborhood, even the kid who we don't see but apparently becomes a D.A. are all people we'd rather be following but for the most part we're stuck with Dylan, who is allegedly a music journalist but seems to reference songs and bands the same way I describe what I got at the grocery store, with some pride that I managed to get through it all but without much feeling for the quality of the ingredients.

You can tell where Lethem is going with this, that he's using the idea of the neighborhood as a place where your real home lies, that you can't ever get away from and he does get some mileage out of a trip back where we see what's changed and what sadly hasn't. But there's so much else going on and Dylan is so aimless that the impact of it becomes lost, especially when he decides to go full on magical realism on us and have the magic ring reappear, leading to a reunion between Dylan and Mingus that again makes you wish the book had followed Mingus more. I'm all for breaking molds and inserting fantastic elements into realistic settings but its presence never sits well in the book. Its too literal to be symbolic and yet its symbolism threatens to overwhelm the literal effects, especially in how Dylan uses it in a fashion that doesn't so much suspend disbelief as throw it out from the airplane without a parachute and assume that the floating sensation of terminal velocity has nothing to do with gravity taking hold. Eventually every piper has to be paid.

With all that said, nothing in the second part ruins the novel, its just that the switch from a deeply felt sketch of childhood to the more realistic adulthood is disappointing in how much energy it loses. Even if that's the point, it subtracts the most fascinating character of that first part and doesn't replace it with anything comparable. And while the ending does sum up one of the novel's aspects well, it feels like Lethem himself realized that his ambition had bitten off slightly more than it could chew and decided to go with the more digestible conclusion. Even that doesn't entirely work, because the anchor the book is wrapped around is so hollow. Dylan never convinces and while the stunning detail of the first part can mask that it can't be hidden forever. For all his name dropping in his latter days of the famous bands that touched him, we never get a sense of what they really do to him, whether its reflexive nostalgia or something deeper. His inner life, such as it is, remains a cipher, more defined by others and what's going on around him than anything else. Perhaps the ending illustrates it best, as during a car ride he sums up by referencing the same Brian Eno album every other person with indie inclinations uses, "Another Green World" (seriously, two indie films I saw last year used the same track for climatic moments) and while its an excellent choice to set a mood perhaps he may have been better served by taking advice from "The True Wheel", a track from the album before where, after fearlessly marshaling his backing band through proggy chaos, Eno yanks the song back into clarity by rising above the clatter and declaring simply "Let's get it understood".