Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude is not an easy book to explain or summarize in a paragraph or two, so I’m going to place that burden on the Random House publicity department by cutting and pasting their summary from the Fortress of Solitude webpage. It still doesn’t do the story justice, but it’s as good as I could up with and certainly more pithy. My analysis follows.
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.
It is a testament Lethem that he successfully weaves so many themes and subjects into Fortress of Solitude without them seeming disparate or making the narrative chaotic. The fact that so many fully formed characters and viewpoints are not only represented but are essential to, not only each other, but also the overall story is quite an accomplishment.
Any one of half a dozen characters or themes in Fortress of Solitude could have sustained their own novel. The fact that the Lethem can shift through so many themes, subjects, and POV’s without alienating the reader is amazing. That’s not to say that some of the shifts aren’t abrupt or jarring, but with a bit of patience on the reader’s part it all fits together and makes sense within the story.
The most jarring example, for me, is the introduction of the magic ring halfway through the novel. Up until that point the story had been a straight period piece/coming-of-age story chronicling Dylan’s difficulties growing up a white Jewish kid in a black Brooklyn neighborhood during the early seventies. Early on Dylan mentions the “flying man” he sees out of the corner of his eye, but that can easily be dismissed as the symbolic figments of a comic obsessed kid. But when that flying man falls out of the sky and gives Dylan the ring, things change. The moment Dylan started flying was so shocking and out of left field for me that I questioned whether it really happened. However, this bit of magical realism opens the story up to explore the core characters and themes in insightful and original ways. The super-powers the ring confers are unpredictable and the personality of the wearer influences both how the ring works and how they act with it on so that it becomes another reflection of each individual character rather than a plot device.
Yet, underneath the period coming-of-age story and magical realism undertones, Fortress of Solitude is a story about race, identity, and culture and where those three things meet, diverge, and run parallel. It’s about the fragile politics of race between two best friends, one white and one black. It’s about the things we cling to, like art and music, which we use to shape our identities. It’s about escaping your upbringing and past and then learning to come to terms with it when you can’t let it go.
Lethem imbues the deeper cultural meaning with an understanding of pop-culture throughout the story that touches on the bigger pop-cultural events of the time like the burgeoning hip-hop and punk movements. This gives the reader reference points, be it an obscure comic book or fondly remembered one-hit-wonder single, which gives the story a knowing and authentic nostalgia.
Fortress of Solitude is a hard book to boil down and dissect. But, as with the best books, it lingers in your subconscious. You can’t help but think about it, and each time you do the story becomes deeper and richer. It’s smart, profound, identifiable and yes, exasperating at times, but overall a worthwhile reading experience.
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