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Original Essays | April 29, 2013
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The Fortress of Solitudeby Jonathan Lethem
Review-A-Day"Lethem is the new poet of Brooklyn — the new Whitman, even, whose bold imagination and sheer love of words defy all forms and expectations and place him among this country's foremost novelists....To say that Lethem bends the rules, pushes the envelope and extends the possibilities of fiction is to state only part of the case. He's defiant, delicious, in his refusal to be pinned....The book is a Bildungsroman in the exact sense, the story of Dylan's self-development in the context of place and time. It's also a comedy, a history and a fantasy, where the strange and supernatural mix freely with the solid and austere, as they do in life, in memory, in everyone's autobiography." Peter Kurth, Salon.com (read the entire Salon review) Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments: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. Review:"Lethem has done a number of things here, any one of which is impossible for any but the very finest novelists. He has vividly and lovingly and truthfully, through thrilling evocation of its music, its popular culture, its street games, argot, pharmacology, social mores and racial politics, recreated a world, a moment in history that I would have thought lost and irrecoverable. He has created, in young Dylan, a genuine literary hero. He has reinvented and reinvigorated the myths of the superhero, of black-white relations, of New York City itself. But most of all, from my point of view, he captures precisely — as only a great novelist can — how it feels to love the world that is, on a daily basis, kicking your ass." Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Wonder Boys
Review:"The Fortress of Solitude is luminous, stinging with truth and life. A story of two boys, a Brooklyn story, an American story that gives in its very specificity the force of the universal." Paula Fox, author of Desperate Characters and Borrowed Finery
Review:"[B]ig, personal, sometimes breathtaking, and sometimes disappointing....
Review:"[C]onfirms Lethem's status as the poet of Brooklyn....
Review:"Lethem is a tremendous writer, and in the first half he uses magnificent language to capture the complexity of a child's worldview....
Review:"[S]prawling, ambitious....[W]hile 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." Library Journal
Review:"[E]motionally compelling....Transcending category while defying expectation, the book starts out sounding like Richard Price, morphs into an unlikely Nick Hornby-Michael Chabon hybrid and resolves itself as only a Jonathan Lethem novel can." Don McLeese, Book Magazine
Review:"[A] stunner...flawlessly evoked, original, and vividly imagined....The final 200 pages maunder, deflate, and stumble through time....As long as Fortress stays earthbound, it soars. (Grade: B+)" Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly
Review:"Magnificent....[A] massively ambitious, profoundly accomplished novel." San Francisco Chronicle
Review:"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
Synopsis:From the funked-up, messed up Brooklyn of the 1970s to the present day, this novel spans 30 years in the life of two best friends, Dylan and Mingus, their families and an entire neighbourhood. From their stories come the history of soul music, graffiti art, comic books and experimental film.
About the AuthorJonathan Lethem is the author of five novels, including Gun, With Occasion Music, and Girl in Landscape. His most recent, Motherless Brooklyn, was named Novel of the Year by Esquire and won The National Book Critics Circle Award and the Salon Book Award. He is also the author of the story collection, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye and the novella This Shape We?re In. He edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, guest-edited The Year?s Best Music Writing 2002, and was the founding fiction editor of Fence Magazine. His writings have appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, McSweeney?s, and many other periodicals. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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