The Fortress of Solitude - Mille feuilles

No cover — The Fortress of Solitude (Paperback, 2004, Vintage Contemporaries)

Paperback, 509 pages

English language

Published Sept. 26, 2004 by Vintage Contemporaries.

ISBN:: 978-0-375-72488-6
OCLC Number:: 318942577

(1 review)

The Fortress of Solitude is the story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. It's a neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along with games of stoopball. In that world, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. As Lethem follows the knitting and unraveling of their friendship, he creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory. The Fortress of Solitude is the first great urban coming of age novel to appear in years. (back cover)

12 editions

4thace@books.theunseen.city reviewed The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

The main character tries making the best of what he's given

4 stars

I consumed this as an eighteen and a half hour long unabridged audiobook, so the last section is clearer in my memory than the earlier parts. It is mainly composed of long sections told from the point of view of Dylan Ebdus, starting when he was a twelve-year old boy on Dean St. in Brooklyn and ending with him in his thirties. It focuses primarily on his struggles, his friends and enemies, the various identities he tries on, his love interests, and the ways he was affected by different role models. Dylan is raised by a hippie mother and an artist father in a tough neighborhood, and is defined as an outsider by his race unavoidably. The novel's plot arc shows just how he gets himself in trouble and manages to squirm out of the worst of the danger. By the end, however, he is still fighting to work out …

I consumed this as an eighteen and a half hour long unabridged audiobook, so the last section is clearer in my memory than the earlier parts. It is mainly composed of long sections told from the point of view of Dylan Ebdus, starting when he was a twelve-year old boy on Dean St. in Brooklyn and ending with him in his thirties. It focuses primarily on his struggles, his friends and enemies, the various identities he tries on, his love interests, and the ways he was affected by different role models. Dylan is raised by a hippie mother and an artist father in a tough neighborhood, and is defined as an outsider by his race unavoidably. The novel's plot arc shows just how he gets himself in trouble and manages to squirm out of the worst of the danger. By the end, however, he is still fighting to work out an existential meaning for it all for himself. We also visit the thoughts of some of the significant presences in Dylan's life as vignettes: his best friend Mingus Rude, Barrett Rude Jr., and Dylan's father Abraham. His mother Rachel is the most significant female character, but makes an early exit. Over time, Dylan learns what matters to him as a person on the street through children's games, music, comic books, and petty crimes. In addition, there is a single magical realism element integral to the story - a ring that comes into Dylan's position with the power of conferring superheroic powers on its wearer, whether flight or invisibility.

As applied to 1970-1990s Brooklyn the book's title suggests to me a hard-edged place where the hero can go without the understanding or assistance of anyone else in the world. For the young Dylan it makes me think of the apartment he sometimes hides himself within when things get too hot for him outside with bullies and authority figures. Once he's grown up, it might refer to the burden of setting things right he has taken upon himself, Superman-like, at a distance from all those he cares about.

There are a couple of recurring elements loaded with meaning. The magical ring can symbolize rising above the environment, escaping scrutiny, but also loss of life itself. It passes through Dylan's life and does damage along the way, teaching him about his own capabilities, though without inparting complete understanding. Also, the "yoke" headlock maneuver shows up as a motif that defines what it is like to live in the ghetto versus college outside New York. It is a brutal, quasi-sexual, and violent coercion, but the words accompanying it are always couched in the form of a question. In this part of Brooklyn, the prospect of prison starts out as a distant unknown for the children, but surfaces later as a frightening threat.

This novel was a grim tale told. The storytelling is complex and suspenseful but as a reader you got the idea that some things are not going to turn out well. By the end of the book, none of the main characters from Dean St. make it out unscathed, and some wear their hurts on the inside instead of externally in a spectacular way. It felt as though there was really little chance that Dylan could ever have come up on the winning side versus the heavy forces that acted on everyone in that neighborhood, and maybe he did about as well as he possibly could.