Up the Creek Book Club
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© 2000 Kathy Craig |
The Fortress of Solitude
by Jonathan Lethem
February 2005
Synopsis
"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.
This is the story Jonathan Lethem was born to tell. This is The Fortress of Solitude." (Publisher)
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." (The 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." (The Village Voice)
Book Club Rating and Comments
If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.
Other Books by Jonathan Lethem
- 'Amnesia Moon'
- 'As She Climbed Across the Table'
- 'Girl in Landscape'
- 'Gun, With Occasional Music'
- 'Kafka Americana'
- 'Motherless Brooklyn' (April 2001)
- 'Ninety Percent of Everything'
- 'This Shape We're In'
- 'The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye'