The Fortress of Solitude

Dylan Ebdus’s friendship with Mingus Rude lived in brief windows of time, punctuation to the unspoken sentences of their days. There was no single story. . . In between anything could happen and was beginning to. (69-70)

It took me so long to finish Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. It required a huge amount of concentration not to get lost in the muddle of things. There were things I didn’t like about this hugely overwritten and overly ambitious novel. Many times it became really wordy and so tedious. But but but

I absolutely loved the beginning and I thought the whole story of the hero’s childhood—-a white boy growing up in a very black Brooklyn in the 70s, amidst art and music and comic books, all tied with the complexities of adolescent friendships and superhero fantasy and with Lethem’s graphic, aggressively poetic writing—-was entrancing. I somehow wished Lethem’s story never left that time and place because those pages were magic.

Dean Street’s kids were drawn out-of-doors, or back to the block from some other place by magnetism, a weird call. Nobody knew they were nostalgic until they saw Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude in the golden leaf-light that covered the middle of the block, a dream of a summer ago, ripened into history while nobody noticed. (160)

The adult parts were not so enjoyable and to me it was only the music and the hope for a revisit with his childhood best friend that kept it going, but there’s a ravishing story in there if you have the patience.