Books
If DeWalt sold Jonathan Lethem's narrative toolkit, it would be big and orange and very expensive. Everything is in it. His profoundly sad novel As She Climbed Across the Table (Doubleday, 1997) was one part love story, two parts science-fiction yarn; Gun with Occasional Music (Harcourt, 1994) took a hardboiled detective and plopped him into a dystopian future. Apparently, no storytelling form is too esoteric or too lowbrow for Lethem to fold inside out and wear with the stitches showing.
Given this creative antsiness, it was only some time before Lethem got around to the Great American Novel, a shadow genre where The Fortress of Solitude (newly released in paperack by Vintage, 528 pp., $14.95) would definitely be shelved. Lyric writing with plangent autobiographical elements? Check. Loose-cut baggy plot that does justice to the American landscape? Check. Enough details about a time period (the '70s) to make it damn clear that Lethem revisited his Life magazines? Check.
What's surprising is that, given how well Lethem understands the ins and outs of genres, none of this seems predetermined, or even phony. In fact, The Fortress of Solitude is by far Lethem's most emotionally affecting novel. Set in Brooklyn during the 1970s, it tells the story of two boys: Dylan Ebdus, a white kid growing up in a black neighborhood, and Mingus Rude, the black son of a drug dealer and failed soul singer who becomes Dylan's emissary of sorts.
Lethem's books have always come with powerful insights into relations between the sexes, but this friendship takes him into new territory. Not just because it is—and is not—about race, but because of the closeness, cleverness and vulnerability he reveals. These kids do everything together, and then, when they get older, their paths diverge. Dylan becomes a music writer who moves to the West Coast; his former best friend becomes a crack addict.
In this way, Fortress of Solitude tells a sad and real story about urban life in America. The book's most potent, memorable character is Brooklyn itself, where Lethem grew up; to this day, he has a foothold still on the block where he once lived. Not surprisingly, the novel chronicles that neighborhood's evolution from tough, graffiti-splattered family warren to yuppie haven. Fortress of Solitude is his elegy for that place, sung through the voices of kids who, anywhere else in the world, may not have gotten along. "This world might be a dungeon these days," Mingus says at one point, looking back on his life, "but a few voices called out to a few others." Do yourself a favor and go hear them sing.
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