#11 Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

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.

#10 Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

I’ve been on a bit of a James Bond kick lately. Until recently I’d never seen the Sean Connery Bond movies much to the chagrin of some of my friends. I had just never gotten around to it. When I was growing up Roger Moore was James Bond and while I enjoyed his portrayal as a kid, it didn’t set world on fire for me. However, I recently watched the Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale and enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. This has in turn has reignited my interest in all things Bond, James Bond. And being the bibliophile that I am, has lead me to Ian Fleming’s original novels.

In Casino Royale, the first in the series, Monsieur Le Chiffre ("the cipher"), the treasurer of a Soviet-backed trade union in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France, is running a baccarat game in the casino at Royale-les-Eaux, France, in order to recover union money he lost in a failed chain of brothels.

Expert baccarat player James Bond (British secret agent 007) is assigned the defeat of Le Chiffre, in the hope that his gambling debts will provoke Soviet espionage agency SMERSH to kill him. Add in Bond Girl/Femme Fatale Vesper Lynd and a few twists and turns and that’s basically what you get.

For those weaned on the film series (especially the aforementioned film version with Daniel Craig) this novel is going to be surprisingly sedate and down to earth. This is definitely Bond in his most formative state and Fleming seems to be feeling his way through the story as much as his main character. All the familiar Bond tropes – the slam bang opening action sequence, the gadgets, the suave personality, quips, and serial womanizing are not in evidence. This Bond is tentative, business-like, brutish and somewhat naïve. I’ve heard that Fleming became influenced by the film series as it developed and its more fantastical elements crept into later novels, but here we have a simple, low-key introduction to the character of James Bond and as such it’s probably one of the most realistic stories in the Bond canon.

For those used to the non-stop action and globetrotting of the films, that realism is going to be hard to take in places. The centerpiece of the novel is the baccarat game and long tedious passages are given over to explaining the intricacies of that card game. The few moments of action can be counted on one hand. However, when they do come, they are sudden, striking and give real weight and character complications to the story. Which is as it should be. Good spy stories are about intrigue, subterfuge, blinds and double blinds. Action is usually a result of something going wrong and should be surprising and have consequence.

While I enjoy the modern Bond, I wonder if he’s not a character of a certain time and place? Part of the appeal of Casino Royale for me is the cold war themes and the portrait of post-war Europe; there is real gravitas to an agent and agency of a humbled old world empire caught between the emerging U.S. and Soviet super-powers and finding its way in the new world order. That is something that is lost in the modern version. What is Bond’s place in the post-cold war era? Today he’s just a generic super secret agent.

I know this version is short lived as the series became more and more cartoonish as it progressed, but at least in Casino Royale, Fleming evokes the fear and tensions of that moment in history and a character figuring out his place in it.

#9 Juliet,Naked by Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked is a return to form in my eyes to the high points of High Fidelity and About A Boy. I absolutely loved those books, so much so, that the muddled, incomprehensible mess that was How To Be Good, Hornby’s follow up to About A Boy, turned me off to everything he’s written since. I felt too burned and betrayed to even bother. However, I read some good reviews for Juliet, Naked and heard an NPR interview with Hornby that intrigued me enough to give it a chance.

Juliet, Naked is the story of Annie, who lives in a decaying British seaside resort town that’s best days are behind it. She has been living with Duncan, a professor of pop cultural studies at the local college, for the last 15 years. It is a relationship build on a foundation of limited options, compromise and inertia. While not fulfilling to Annie in the least, she has settled into a stagnant yet comfortable routine.

The true passion in Duncan’s life is a singer named Tucker Crowe, who is a sort of fictional equivalent of Jackson Browne or Nick Drake. Twenty-five years earlier he released "Juliet", considered among his fans and critics to be his greatest work and a classic break-up album on par with Bob Dylan’s "Blood On Tracks" or Derek & The Domino’s "Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs". Shortly afterward Crowe mysteriously walked away from it all, and hasn’t recorded or made any public appearances since. Duncan runs a website dedicated to Crowe’s music and considers himself a “Croweologist”. Duncan and his small band of online devotee’s dissect the minutia of Crowe’s life and music looking for any clues to explain the singer’s self-imposed seclusion.

When Crowe’s record company sends Duncan a pre-release copy of acoustic demo’s of the songs from "Juliet" entitled "Juliet, Naked", Annie intercepts it in the mail and passive aggressively writes a scathing review of it on Duncan’s website. A few days later she receives an e-mail from Crowe himself who has been living quietly in Pennsylvania for the past twenty years and who agrees with her assessment. That set’s up an online “affair” that drives the novel.

Hornby is at his best when he is examining his pet themes, the ennui produced by self doubt and the past that immobilizes people, and the collector mentality and how people substitute the obsessive compulsive love of things (records, movies) for real intimacy with people.

Where in High Fidelity, Hornby’s obsessive music geeks gathered in the social nexus of a record store to debate their endless top five lists, in Juliet, Naked, Duncan and his “Croweologists” know each other only by online screen names. Hornby perfectly illustrates the insular online message board mentality, were anonymous and far-flung fans endlessly debate the details of their chosen obsessions until reality and objectivity warp. I knew someone like Duncan, he was my roommate in college, and Hornby has that character and fan driven website culture down to a “T”. The boxes that people close themselves off in while feeling that they are part of a “community”, in which they can feel a part of something without actually having to venture out of the security of their bedroom. It also gets into the issue of intimacy online, and do you really know someone if your sole interaction is online?

Like Hornby himself, his characters are now either entering middle-age or on the cusp of it and facing the realities associated with that time of life. In High Fidelity and About A Boy, Rob Fleming and Will Freeman get second chances to right themselves from the corners they’ve backed themselves into, things are not that simple for Annie and Tucker. They are facing the reality that they’ve let decades slip by wasted, that their most productive years are gone and now they have to figure out what increasingly limited options they have left. The book has many instances of characters being stuck in past and how the world has an unforgiving way of moving on without them.

Juliet, Naked’s reality is a stark one for it’s characters, but the story is told with Hornby’s trademark humor and eye for pop-culture detail, both past and present. While not quite as good as High Fidelity or About A Boy, it’s entertaining, poignant, has something to say for itself and is worth a read.

#8 Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill

If the horror novel Heart Shaped Box has an air of familiarity about it, it’s because its author comes by it naturally. Joe Hill is the pen name of Joe King, whose father Steven is known for writing a horror novel or two in his time.

Heart Shaped Box tells the story of middle aged heavy metal star Judas “Jude” Coyne (yes the pun gets addressed in the book) who is now largely retired and reclusive, living on his farm in upstate New York with a series of twenty something women that he nicknames after the state they’re from (he’s currently with “Georgia”). His main pastime is collecting macabre items and memorabilia, such as paintings by serial killers and an authentic snuff film passed on to him from a fan in law enforcement. As such, he can’t resist when he is emailed a link to an online auction in which someone is selling the ghost of their recently departed stepfather. The winner gets the dead man’s favorite suit and his spectral presence along with it.

Of course, everything is not as it seems, the suit which arrives in a large heart shaped candy box was sent by the family of “Florida” a depressive young girl who Jude sent on her way when she got to be too much for him to handle. Florida committed suicide shortly afterward and the family, both dead and alive, are looking to make Jude pay for his past sins.

Hill, like his father, has a knack for turning over common, everyday things and exposing the creepy underbelly. This is used to great effect in a number of unsettling and eerie scenes including one in a Denny’s in which the diner next to them is using one of those electronic voice box microphones which starts talking on its own.

Also like his father, Hill has the talent for developing fully realized and individual characters. There is not one main character in this book that you do not fully find out who they are and their back-story, which makes it all the more horrifying when bad things happen to them.

That’s not to say that Hill is merely a cipher. He is a very talented writer that possesses a dexterity with words and a talent for turning a phrase that has always eluded the older King. Based on his writing, I can easily foresee him producing a literary novel of some note. That is why, ultimately, I find some disappointment with Heart Shaped Box. The potential of the writer is not fully realized. So much more could be done with it. Haunting as metaphor for the regrets, mistakes, and people we have wronged that cling to us, especially in middle age when we begin to face our mortality is so ripe for an in-depth treatment. Unfortunately after a promising beginning, that is not what we get here. The book falls into a comfortable, slightly rote, thriller track about mid-way. It’s entertaining but wholly predicable.

Jude is a little too easily redeemed, the guy was a pretty big asshole at the beginning, and that shouldn’t be completely washed away. Also, can we have a moratorium on sexual abuse in horror/thriller novels? It becoming a little overused as the underlying “big bad” simmering beneath the surface and its use for shock value is wearing thin.

Heart Shaped Box, while not all it could be, has a lot to offer for a debut novel. If you’re a horror fan it has all the requisite chills and thrills. Hill is a talented writer and I hope to see him develop that talent beyond his obvious comfort zone.

#7 The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Steig Larsson is the sequel to Larsson’s bestseller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which I read earlier this year. The series, which is dubbed “The Millennium Trilogy” and includes the just released The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, is trumpeted in press releases as a publishing phenomenon selling a bazillion copies on both sides of the Atlantic, inspiring hardcore fans to import copies because they couldn’t wait for the American release dates, prompting two different film franchises, one in it’s native Sweden and a soon to be produced American version, and making “Swedish mysteries” a suddenly popular literary sub-genre.

All of this hubbub has got to mean something, right? Well, don’t drink the Kool-aid just yet. I was initially drawn to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo based on a glowing New York Times review, which dubbed it exceptionally smart and literary for a mystery/thriller. The Times Book Review also put it in their top ten books of the year the year it was released. I don’t know what they were smoking, but there is nothing in this series to raise it above your standard beach read.

I’m going to talk about both The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire together because “Fire” is in essence the middle chapter of the Trilogy and really doesn’t stand on it’s own. Although it makes half-hearted attempts to bring new readers up to speed, it presupposes knowledge of the first book. In “Dragon Tattoo” we are introduced to Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander. Blomkvist is a recently disgraced investigative reporter who is hired by an eccentric industrialist to solve the mystery of his niece who disappeared 30 years earlier. Salander is a computer hacker who becomes his research assistant. She is “The Girl…” in all of the titles and this is basically her story despite how the first book starts off the overall story arc.

In “Fire” Salander is accused of murdering three people and in the ensuing investigation her mysterious past is brought to light. Salander is an extremely interesting and compelling character. She is the reason I kept chugging along through this often messy and convoluted story. Larsson wisely makes Salander the central character after the first book, even though her portrayal becomes unbelievably cartoonish as the series progresses. While she at first seems intriguingly conflicted and contradictory, as the layers are pulled back she is made to be a veritable super-hero to the detriment of any expectations of realism. We find out she is a savant with a photographic memory who can hack into any computer and memorize and learn “anything” by reading it once. There is a forced tangent shoehorned into “Fire” about how she reads theoretical mathematics textbooks just for fun and solves Fermat’s Theorem, which has perplexed mathematicians for hundreds of years, in a matter of weeks.

Salander’s characterization is not the only time Larsson falls into fan-fiction wish fulfillment in his writing. Blomkvist (a character clearly modeled on himself, they both share the same background) sleeps with every eligible female character in both books, just because he can under Larsson’s pen, whether it makes sense plot-wise or not.

Larsson takes many liberties story-wise. His plots are sloppy and meandering, he goes off on tangents that have nothing to do with the overall story, and he has a frequent tendency to bend plot logic to suit his needs. He tries to set up an underlying theme of Sweden’s backward attitude of violence toward women but revels in his salaciously detailed depictions of rape and torture throughout the two books.

These books are entertaining enough if you totally shut off your brain, Salander is an extremely readable character, and the momentum and cliffhangers are enough to propel you along. But for the life of me, I can’t understand why Larsson is so highly regarded, when in my estimation he’s no different than a populist page turner like James Patterson.

#6 The Hunter by Richard Stark

Bad people making bad decisions. That is the most succinct way to describe Richard Stark’s novel “The Hunter”.

Stark was one of many pseudonyms for the prolific crime/noir author Donald E. Westlake. In the days before James Patterson and Nora Roberts it was considered bad business to “flood the market” with more than one book by a particular author per year. Hence, writers like Westlake, who wrote three or four books a year, would release them under pen names. Richard Stark was the name he primarily used for his “Parker” series, of which “The Hunter” is the first book.

“The Hunter” centers on Parker (no first name is ever given), a con artist, thief and heist man who is out for revenge on the people who double-crossed him on his last job and left him for dead. It doesn’t matter that he was secretly planning on double-crossing them and they turned the tables on him before he could carry out his plan. He pursues them with a single-minded relentlessness, taking on a huge organized crime operation in the process.

“The Hunter” is pitch black, even for a noir novel. None of the characters have any redeeming qualities and Stark does not try to make them sympathetic in any way. Parker in particular is a remorseless thug. He leaves a long trail of collateral damage to innocent and not so innocent bystanders along the way and doesn’t seem to particularly care. In the most disturbing scene of the book for me, Parker breaks into a beauty parlor to stakeout the mob hotel across the street and in the process; knocks out the manager who was closing up, ties her up and gags her and inadvertently kills her when she suffocates from a asthma attack. He only notices she is dead when he contemplates raping her.

I’m not one of those people who need’s to like or identify with the characters to find a book interesting or worth reading. There really is no way to identify with the Parker, unless you’re a sociopath, but that doesn’t make it any less compelling, especially for fans of crime fiction/noir.

At the time it was written, 1961, I would think that it was rare or unusual for the protagonist to essentially be the antagonist and you can see the echo's and influence of "The Hunter" in much modern crime fiction. Stark paints a fascinating portrait of not only a place and time, but of a criminal underworld that is dank, dirty and sloppy. Parker is not so much smart as he is cunning. For as resourceful as he is in pursuing his objectives, he make tons of stupid mistakes that come back to haunt him. It is noir, after all, and nobody gets what they want.

Stark proves himself a master of the genre. His prose is taunt, clipped and hard-boiled. Like his characters he doesn’t mess around and gets right to the point, keeping the reader in the immediate moment and filling in the details later with the old noir standby, the flashback. The story moves fast and when the dust settles Parker is left with little except a trail of destruction behind him and an opportunity for continued misadventures.

“The Hunter” has been adapted for the screen twice, once as “Point Blank” with Lee Marvin and as “Payback” with Mel Gibson. Neither movie does the book justice. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re a fan of dark noir/crime fiction then go straight to the source material.

#5 Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris

Joshua Ferris’s impressive debut novel is set in a Chicago advertising agency at the beginning of the decade. The agency and its employees are starting to feel the pinch after the dotcom bust and are reeling from the looming specter of impending layoffs after the economically flush years during the nineties.

Ferris brilliantly uses the collective “we” of corporate speak as his narrative device and in the course of the novel both reinforces the truths and dismantles the myths of the collective “we” that inhabits any office. The way the narrative is structured, we the reader are part of the office “we” and are a voyeuristic participant in the gossip, goofing off, meetings, deadlines and after work happy hours.

“Then We Came To The End” encapsulates the surreal microcosm of office life. The office gossip that must be broken down in excruciating detail, the daily rituals that can’t be deviated from, the ingenious time wasters and ways to avoid doing work, the territoriality and unspoken hierarchy, the in-jokes and gallows humor, all of which is seemingly paramount to those caught up in it, but meaningless to someone on the outside.

It is that irksome outside world intruding on the hermetically sealed unreality of office life that gives the novel its emotional heft and perspective. We don’t operate in a vacuum, and illness, family tragedy, divorce and a changing corporate landscape all find a way to seep in. It’s a testament to the novel that none of the characters and situations go the predictable way that they may seem to be moving towards. Nobody is a stock character or stereotype and in the course of the novel all the main characters end up showing multiple sides of themselves.

Like any good office story, we get it in bits and pieces and from many different sources. Sometimes the pieces form a whole and other times there’s no way to get the whole story. People leave and take their details with them. That is part of the underlying theme of “Then We Came To End”. All of the team building and camaraderie and surrogate family are an illusion that ends when the elevator doors close on a laid off co-worker and their sad cardboard box full of personal belongings. They then just become an empty cubicle whose occupant you can’t quite remember the name of.

“Then We Came To The End” perfectly summarizes modern corporate culture and the fact that nobody is going to retire with a gold watch after working 30 years for the same company anymore. Nothing is guaranteed and those experiences and people that seemed so constant at the time are ephemeral.

If you’ve ever worked in an office, you’ll appreciate this book. It’s funny, poignant, tragic, and says something compelling about the world we live in like all the best books do. I ripped through it in a day and half if that helps sell you on it.