Fortress of Solitude (Lethem)

Book Reviews
The Fortress of Solitude is crowded beyond my powers of summary with lessons, insights, facts, dates, song titles and minor characters. But I much prefer its mess and sprawl to the tightly wound intellectual parlor tricks of earlier Lethem novels like As She Climbed Across the Table and Girl in Landscape. The fictional (Barrett Rude, Abraham Ebdus) is squeezed in alongside the actual (Marvin Gaye, Stan Brakhage), and the naturalistic geography of a borough Lethem knows like the back of his hand is illuminated by a daub of magic realism, when Dylan and Mingus come into possession of a ring that gives them super powers.
A.O.Scot - New York Times

Lethem reconfigures his own autobiography in a book as deep into race as Invisible Man, as deep into the sidewalks of New York as Call It Sleep, and as deep into pop — comics, sci-fi again, and especially music — as everybody but the watchdogs of seriousness.
Village Voice

Magnificent.... [A] massively ambitious, profoundly accomplished novel.
San Francisco Chronicle

Glorious, chaotic, raw.... One of the richest, messiest, most ambitious, most interesting novels of the year. . . . Lethem grabs and captures 1970s New York City, and he brings to it a story worth telling.
Time

If there still remains any doubt, this novel confirms Lethem's status as the poet of Brooklyn and of motherless boys. Projected through the prism of race relations, black music and pop art, Lethem's stunning, disturbing and authoritatively observed narrative covers three decades of turbulent events on Dean Street, Brooklyn. When Abraham and Rachel Ebdus arrive there in the early 1970s, they are among the first whites to venture into a mainly black neighborhood that is just beginning to be called Boerum Hill. Abraham is a painter who abandons his craft to construct tiny, virtually indistinguishable movie frames in which nothing happens. Ex-hippie Rachel, a misguided liberal who will soon abandon her family, insists on sending their son, Dylan, to public school, where he stands out like a white flag. Desperately lonely, regularly attacked and abused by the black kids ("yoked," in the parlance), Dylan is saved by his unlikely friendship with his neighbor Mingus Rude, the son of a once-famous black singer, Barnett Rude Jr., who is now into cocaine and rage at the world. The story of Dylan and Mingus, both motherless boys, is one of loyalty and betrayal, and eventually different paths in life. Dylan will become a music journalist, and Mingus, for all his intelligence, kindness, verbal virtuosity and courage, will wind up behind bars. Meanwhile, the plot manages to encompass pop music from punk rock to rap, avant-garde art, graffiti, drug use, gentrification, the New York prison system—and to sing a vibrant, sometimes heartbreaking ballad of Brooklyn throughout. Lethem seems to have devoured the '70s, '80s and '90s-inhaled them whole—and he reproduces them faithfully on the page, in prose as supple as silk and as bright, explosive and illuminating as fireworks. Scary and funny and seriously surreal, the novel hurtles on a trajectory that feels inevitable. By the time Dylan begins to break out of the fortress of solitude that has been his life, readers have shared his pain and understood his dreams. Although it has less edge-of-the-seat suspense than the Award-winning Motherless Brooklyn, this novel will enhance Lethem's literary reputation and win a wider audience for his work.
Publishers Weekly

Like Don DeLillo's Underworld, this sprawling, ambitious work by Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn) gives a kind of social history of late 20th-century America while remaining grounded in the childhood world of New York stoops. Instead of the 1950s Bronx, however, Lethem starts his story in a few sullen blocks in Brooklyn, following the friendship of two neighbor boys of different races, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude, from the urban era of "white flight" in the early 1970s to gentrification. The life of the block is superbly drawn over the book's first 200 pages, especially Lethem's evocations of children's street life; the years of shakedowns and "yokings" suffered by Dylan, a boy left heartbreakingly unprepared by his hippyish parents, are so knowingly described that anyone who ever suffered the attention of bullies will have to take reading breaks. Also like Underworld, however, Lethem's novel can seem overfilled with cultural riffing, however brilliantly observed. Dylan and Mingus share the boyhood worlds of comics and graffiti (even splitting a street tag identity), of rap, and even of a ring with magic powers, but ultimately they compete with Lethem's scene-setting cultural and musical criticism. And while Lethem is an impressively savvy writer on race, women come and go without adding much weight to his story. This flawed but daring work is recommended for all general collections. —Nathan Ward
Library Journal

Lethem explores many avenues: the origins of gentrification, the development of soul music, the genealogy of graffiti, the seeds of the crack epidemic. The different concepts converge in the closing pages, but this often-excellent novel labors under the weight of its ambition. —Keir Graff
Booklist

Abandoning the inspired and nimble high-concept genre alchemy of his previous novels, Jonathan Lethem follows up his award-winning Tour(ette's)-de-force, Motherless Brooklyn (1999), with a big, personal, sometimes breathtaking, and sometimes disappointing book about music, class, race, authenticity, Brooklyn, and America. Dylan Ebdus is the son of an obsessive monklike artist father and an opinionated hippie-ish mother whose ill-considered idealism plants the family, before she disappears, in a not-yet-gentrified black Brooklyn neighborhood where Dylan’s whiteness becomes his defining quality. Dylan’s best friend, Mingus Rude, has inherited the charisma and effortless cool of his drug-addicted, soul-singer father, Barrett Rude Jr., and Dylan’s existence improves as he taps into it, unaware of the cost to Mingus. When a wino gives Dylan a ring that grants the wearer the power of flight, the boys try to emulate comic-book superheroes, but their crime-fighting backfires, and the ring is used, individually and together, only a handful of times. Following them through the ’70s, we witness the birth of hip-hop culture as the boys tag the city with graffiti and black music turns into what will one day be rap. Dylan’s entering an elite Manhattan high school is his path out of Brooklyn to the larger, white world, and he willfully abandons Mingus, who then teams with Dylan's bête noire, criminal thug Robert Woolfolk, for drug-dealing and eventual disaster. Dylan tries to escape his origins at a Vermont college, a rich-kid Eden, where he encounters the "suburban obliviousness...to the intricate boundaries of race and music which were my inheritance and obsession," but he’s expelled for trailingBrooklyn, and the wrong kind of drug dealing, behind him. Dylan moves on to Berkeley, where he becomes a music writer with a black girlfriend. On a trip to LA—during which he disastrously pitches the story of the Prisonaires, a black singing group formed in jail, to DreamWorks—Dylan finds a lead to his missing mother, and is spurred to visit Mingus in jail. An on-and-off crack addict, mostly incarcerated since shooting his fallen preacher grandfather at 18, Mingus is now fully revealed as bearer of the black man’s burden. Dylan is the self-serving phoenix that rises from Mingus’s sacrifice, as popular music is constructed from the sounds of black suffering. When Dylan offers him the ring to break out, Mingus directs him to give it to Robert Woolfolk, incomprehensible, unyielding Other. The opening section, Dylan’s childhood, is some kind of miracle: the subtleties and cruelties of growing up in the mysterious world, and the nearly instinctive dance of black and white, are perfectly captured in a sometimes dreamy lyric voice anchored by a gorgeous specificity of detail, a vivid portrait of a very particular time and place that rises to the universal. Later, though, while this unique vision of race is intelligent, nuanced, and complex, it becomes sometimes a bit schematic, with symbolism too bald, and, like Dylan’s every effort to expiate his white guilt, it makes things worse: the story, weighed down, ceases to soar. Still, though, terrifically entertaining: a fine, rich, thoughtful novel from one of our best writers. Play that funky music, white boy.
Kirkus Reviews