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The Fortress of Solitude
Jonathan Lethem, 2003
Knopf Doubleday
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375724886
Summary
This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification."
This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most simple human decisions—what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch money—are laden with potential political, social and racial disaster. This is the story of 1990s America, when no one cared anymore.
This is the story of punk, that easy white rebellion, and crack, that monstrous plague. This is the story of the loneliness of the avant-garde artist and the exuberance of the graffiti artist.
This is the story of what would happen if two teenaged boys obsessed with comic book heroes actually had superpowers: They would screw up their lives.
This is the story of joyous afternoons of stickball and dreaded years of schoolyard extortion. This is the story of belonging to a society that doesn't accept you. This is the story of prison and of college, of Brooklyn and Berkeley, of soul and rap, of murder and redemption. (From the publisher.)
Lethem moved returned to Brooklyn in 1996, after which he published Girl in Landscape (1998) about a world populated by aliens but "very strongly influenced" by the 1956 John Wayne Western The Searchers, a movie with which Lethem is "obsessed."
In 1999, he released Motherless Brooklyn, a return to the detective theme, with a protagonist suffering from Tourette syndrome and obsessed with language. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, The Macallan Gold Dagger for crime fiction, and the Salon Book Award, and was named book of the year by Esquire.I'm writing short stories right now, that's what I do between novels, and I love them. I'm very devoted to it.... [T]he story collections I've published are tremendously important to me. And many of the uncollected stories—or yet-to-be-collected stories—are among my proudest writings. They're very closely allied, obviously, to novel writing. But also very distinct..
In 2005 Lethem released The Disappointment Artist, his first collection of essays, and in the same year he received a MacArthur Fellowship.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
Discussion Questions
1. Why has Jonathan Lethem titled his novel The Fortress of Solitude? Where does the phrase come from? In what ways is Dylan Ebdus a solitary child? In what ways does he live inside a fortress?
2. What does The Fortress of Solitude reveal about the dynamics of childhood friendships? What kind of friendship does Dylan have with Mingus Rude? With Arthur Lomb? Why does Dylan want so badly to be accepted by Mingus?
3. The Fortress of Solitude is a realistic novel, except for one fantastic element: the magic ring that enables its wearer to fly and to become invisible. Why has Lethem included the ring in the story? What effect does it have on Dylan? How is the ring crucial to the plot of the novel?
4. When Mingus asks Dylan if "everything" is cool, Dylan thinks of his science teacher explaining that "the universe was reportedly exploding in slow motion, everything falling away from everything else at a fixed rate. It was a good enough explanation for now" [p. 118]. Why does Dylan think of this theory at this moment? How does it explain Dylan's neighborhood and home life?
5. What effect do comic books, pop music, and other aspects of popular culture have on the characters in The Fortress of Solitude? How is Dylan's sense of self shaped by his fascination with comic book superheroes?
6. When he sees Dose's tag on a sleeping homeless man, Abraham tells Dylan, "Maybe this is just a terrible place. Maybe in these streets right andwrong are confused, so you and your friends run insane like animals that would do this to a human person" [p. 141]. Is Abraham correct in his assessment? How does the Gowanus neighborhood affect those who grow up in it?
7. Abby tells Dylan, "Your childhood is some privileged sanctuary you live in all the time, instead of here with me" [p. 316-17]. Why is Dylan so obsessed with understanding his childhood? How have his childhood experiences made it harder for him to connect with others?
8. As Dylan is attempting to rescue Mingus from prison, he thinks of the "ordinary angst" he'd earned as a "grown-up Californian . . . an author of liner notes, an inadequate boyfriend," and asks himself: "How could I have thrown over these attainments for this chimera of rescue?" [p. 488]. Why does he take such risks to rescue Mingus? What are his real reasons for offering the ring to Robert Woolfolk?
9. In what ways is The Fortress of Solitude a satirical novel? How are Hollywood and private school education depicted in the novel? How does Lethem present the world of science fiction publishing?
10. Near the end of the novel, Abby tells Dylan, "I guess being enthralled with negritude still beats self-reflection every time" [p. 457]. Is it true that Dylan is obsessed with race? Does he use that obsession to avoid self-knowledge? What is he afraid to discover about himself?
11. When Dylan leaves Croft Vendle, he thinks: "He wasn't the father I never had. . . . Abraham was the father I never had, and Rachel was the mother I never had, and Gowanus or Boerum Hill was the home I never had, everything was only itself however many names it carried" [p. 506]. In what sense is it true that Dylan grew up without a mother or a father or a home? How have these absences affected him?
12. The Fortress of Solitude is a vivid evocation of a particular period and place, as seen through the eyes of Dylan Ebdus, and while the novel does not overtly make any large statements about race relations, what does it suggest about how blacks and whites see each other? What scenes particularly dramatize the tensions between blacks and whites in Brooklyn?
13. The Fortress of Solitude includes two self-contained chapters, "Liner Note" and "Prisonaires," which function almost as set pieces. Why has Lethem included these? How are they different from the rest of the narrative? What do they reveal about Dylan?
14. In interviews, Jonathan Lethem has described the novel as structured like a musical boxed set. In what ways is this novel reminiscent of a boxed set? Why might Lethem have chosen this structure?
15. Much of The Fortress of Solitude concerns the gentrification of Gowanus into Boerum Hill. How has the neighborhood changed when Dylan returns at the end of the novel? Has the neighborhood been genuinely improved or simply turned into another playground for the trendy? What does Dylan mean when he says: "A gentrification was the scar left by a dream, Utopia the show which always closed on opening night"? [p. 508]
16. At the end of the novel, Dylan thinks of his mother pushing him into nearly all-black public schools "which were becoming only rehearsals for prison. Her mistake was so beautiful, so stupid, so American" [p. 508]. Why does Dylan think it was a mistake for Rachel to send him to public school? What does Dylan mean when he calls that mistake beautiful, stupid, and American?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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