The Fortress of Solitude

Fortress of Solitude is about a white kid named Dylan growing up in black Brooklyn. It's so jam packed with minutia, pointless little details and childhood events, and jumps around so much during the first half that it's a confusing and frustrating read.

Halfway through this 500+ page monster Dylan starts narrating his own story. He's grown up, moved away, obsessed with music, and tries to find his childhood friend Marcus. As he goes back to Brooklyn the first half of the book makes it easier to enjoy Dylan's interactions with his childhood friends in the second half because we've sat through the boring process of seeing them grow up together. But even then, the story and concussion aren't satisfying enough to make the book noteworthy in my opinion.

Also, what's up with their obsession with this ring? Does it actually have powers or is it all in their head? Lethem doesn't bother explaining, and it's fitting given how sloppy this book is that we never find out.

This was the first time I read Jonathan Lethem, and for the first 20 or 30 pages I was undergoing a sense of shock regarding what a tremendously talented writer he is. His descriptive power is wonderful, and he paints his New York setting with great depth and compassion, but...
this book is unreadable.
After 140 pages, with still no plot in sight, and a unredemtively boring main character, I'm giving up. To this point, Lethem has been painting Dylan's life and world for us - Dylan's mom leaving the house, Dylan getting beat up routinely at school, Mingus Rude trying to show Dylan the ropes of life on the street. Fine and dandy, but there's no plot here, and despite how much we know about Dylan's life, we still hardly know anything about Dylan. He hardly ever says or thinks or does anything... he just drifts, and he has yet to become a character I care enough about to see how things turn out for him.
I hope to read Lethem again, I hope his talents are matched with some taut plotting to make a truly engrossing read, but it did not happen in this book.

i finished johnathan lethem's "the fortress of solitude" today, and i'm trying to comprehend what he tried to pull off and if in fact he pulled it off. i don't think so, not completely, but he came damned close. the first 300 pages are near perfect, but the last 200, while hugely enjoyable and totally readable, wobble, especially the last 50, where lethem may have tried too hard. but god bless him for trying. and, as i said, he almost manages it. god bless him for that too.
it is an amazing book in many ways, a junk drawer full of childhood memories, circa the mid- to late-1970s, specific to brooklyn but in many ways universal. it's a knowing, unblinking look at race relations and friendship and music (especially music!) and puberty and drugs and pretty much anything else you can name. the friendship between the white dylan (a product of liberal guilt) and the black mingus (a product of the streets that liberal guilt could never fix) is heartbreaking and feels right and real. the language is straightforward except when it's startlingly poetic, but still absolutely right, not flashy, not a conceit.
but, amid all the grime and the crime and the growing-up stuff in the book's first half and the remembering and the regret and the emotional paralysis in its second half, there is a subplot that at first i couldn't accept that lethem meant to be taken at face value. yet there it was, with no apologies. we are asked to believe that over the course of 30 years, the boys, mad about comic books in their youth, share possession of a ring that allows them, sort of, to first fly like a superhero, then, more successfully, to disappear. try as i might to convince myself these were purely symbolic acts, i finally had to accept the fact that people do fly here, in brooklyn and beyond, except when they don't, crash-landing with varying, ultimately lethal results.
it doesn't quite work in the final analysis. but it comes oh-so-close. and in a way the "failure" doesn't matter. the first two-thirds of "the fortress of solitude" are so spectacularly, achingly successful that nothing that could happen in the final third - which also is very strong despite the unexpected aeronautics - would make this anything other than an exceptionally good, okay great - there i've said it - novel.
i recommend it.

When I began reading the book I was excited since I had worked in the area in the 1960s. However, got over half way through the book and decided life is too short to spend time completing this book. Could not relate to any of the characters.

There are some beautiful moments in the Fortress of Solitude--moments of crystalline description, of poetic evocation of time and place, moments of heartbreaking human interaction. But for me, these moments just didn't hold together long enough or happen often enough.
The novel follows Dylan Ebdus, known as "whiteboy" to those around him on Dean Street due to the rarity of his skin color, as he grows up and out of the Brooklyn neighborhood. While we see Dylan from five through middle-age, most of the book focuses on his young teen years and especially his friendship with Mingus Rude, a friendship which goes on and off through the years. Both boys are motherless. Dylan's liberal-minded mother has left him to his painter father who has given up a promising artist career to work obsessively on an abstract painting on film while Mingus lives with his father, Barret Junior--a once-famous singer who spirals into drugs and obscurity. Both fathers threaten to take their children down with them, both father try to rise out of their depths.
Other main characters include another young white boy even further down the junior and high school hierarchy than Dylan and a street tough who is a running physical and psychological threat to Dylan over the years.
Many have lauded the evocation of 1970's Brooklyn--the poetic recreation of that world of stickball and skully and comic books and stoopball and gentrification. And there is, as mentioned, some truly amazing writing put to that purpose. But for all the loving detail, it never felt intimate enough to evoke much feeling to me. Some of the pop references felt like set pieces or throw-away time markers, some sections were overly long and others not long enough, some had powerful emotive effects (the section of skully for instance) and others seemed recitation of cold descriptive facts.
Part of the problem was that the characters never truly felt fully-formed or real to me, especially Mingus, so I cared even less about the setting. A lot of time is spent on early Dylan to good effect but he starts to pale as a character as the book goes on and is not particularly likable or more importantly interesting as an adult. Mingus is too often too removed (both literally and figuratively) and therefore too many of the character "tags" associated with him--graffiti, drug use, drug dealing--have the feel of cliche rather than character development. The other white boy, Arthur, I found too often simply unbelievable in his speech, which was too bad since it was a distraction from his actions, which could have had much more of an emotional impact had I accepted him as a person.
The magical-realism part involving a ring which can supposedly make the wearer fly or invisible among other powers dependent upon its user, feels a bit forced and uneven; it intervenes clumsily at times, more effectively at others. The same is true of the comic book motif which moves from painfully belabored to beautifully evocative of desire and loneliness and despair and power.
Overall, the book just didn't hold together for me. It was too episodic in nature without adding up to a whole greater than its parts and the characters were just not fully formed enough for me to care despite the plot's weaknesses and uneven pace. The best section for me was the middle, past the first 100 pages or so. I was tempted several times in those first 100 to put it down, and even more so once Dylan moved into his older teens and on to college then adulthood, but the potential and the occasional gem of a sentence or paragraph or several pages would keep me going through the next rough patch, which is why I gave it a three. Ultimately though, its strengths were overshadowed by its weaknesses and I finished unsure if I would have been better off giving into the temptation to quit earlier.

For the past couple of years, when my fiancé has been asked his opinion about a book, he's often been replying, "It was really good -- but not as good as Fortress of Solitude." (Books he's said this about: Kavalier and Clay, Everything is Illuminated, and Motherless Brooklyn, for example.) So I finally got around to reading it, and I have a feeling I'm going to be saying the same thing for quite some time. I absolutely loved this book; as soon as I finished the last page (breathless and in tears), I wanted to flip back to page one and start again, just so I could keep living in the world I'd been sharing with Lethem's characters for the last few weeks. (And I would have, but my fiancé's got first dibs on re-reading.)

A number of reviewers have complained that this book is slow, and I don't disagree. Fortress of Solitude is absolutely not a plot-driven book -- you won't be desperately flipping the pages to follow the characters through their adventures, skimming ahead to find out who lives or dies or what the next twist will be -- at least not often. The only other Lethem I've read is Motherless Brooklyn, which was essentially a murder mystery, so the two books differ greatly in their pacing and structure. If you loved Motherless Brooklyn, as I did, you may be surprised by how different the two books are. But the slow, descriptive, poetic quality of Fortress of Solitude was, in my view, its greatest strength.

Dylan Ebdus is the main character of this book, but its real subject, I think, is not so much Dylan as it is Brooklyn. This is a book about childhood and the process of growing up, and about a country and a neighborhood changing over the course of 30 years, more than it is a book about particular events in its characters' lives. And that description could make it sound like this is an abstract book -- but like the best art, it achieves universality only through the closely observed particularity of its subject. Because, on the page, it is just this: an artful description of particular events in its characters' lives. After finishing it, more than with any book I've read for quite some time, I feel as though the events of the book are my own memories and the characters people that I've known. So maybe that's why I say it is a book about childhood, growing up, the world changing: because those are the universal themes in it that made its particular moments so relatable.

I've been trying to think of a book to compare Fortress of Solitude to, but it's different than the fiction I usually read and love. There are aspects of the book that remind me of some of the Faulkner I've read; particularly Light in August. The settings and characters of Faulkner's work are quite different, but both books derive their beauty from close observations of a collection of moments in their characters' lives, moments that don't always directly lead from one to another, but rather gather together into a document of memories and images. The pleasure of reading Fortress of Solitude comes mostly from the almost cinematic experience of envisioning its sensual descriptions of a life. If you're finding it slow going, I'd suggest just giving it some time; it's a hard book to get into in 15-minute increments. I found it beautifully written but not particularly compelling at the beginning; I think I put it down for about a week before starting up again. But for me, it was well worth the effort to get into; by the end, I couldn't put it down, and I've been talking about it ever since.

Almost four stars. I felt like i was reading two different books at times. I enjoyed reading about this kid growing up in Brooklyn with his dad, his friends, school, survival, drugs, stickball...and then all of a sudden it takes a very strage turn. Now he's got this ring...the story now requires the reader to strecth the bounderies of what is believable. It came as a complete surprise, but still i was ready to keep going. The second half of the book seems to lose its focus. Why wouldn't a kid with a magic ring use it more often? I was bored to tears reading about the Prisonaires. And i was bored reading about his father's artwork, and his trip to California. The ending was lame. i can't see it going down like that. But still it was worth the price of admission.

God I loved this book. Johathan Latham writes like an angel. This long book tells a gritty urban tale with a huge cast of characters. It spans from childhood to middle age, from Broolyn to Oakland. Though gritty, his is a sympathic and philosophical view that rings true. I accepted it all, with just a moment of puzzlement when the magic ring is introduced, but that was OK. This is fiction after all. The book is an epic, entertaining, and thought provoking read. It vindicates fiction, which I occassionally give up on.

Lethem's book depicts a poignant relationship between a white and black boy living in the Seventies and how they are able to connect despite of and in many ways due to their differences resulting from the roles of their races defined by cultural expectation. On a larger level, the book uses this friendship to explore the American white/black dynamic and the sometimes conflictual sometimes symbiotic relationship as it developed from the post-Civil Rights Era to today. Lethem then throws in a touch of magical realism for a some extra spice. This comes in the form of a magical ring that gives the boys unpractical super-powers. I also particularly admire the structure of this book. It is broken into three section, and the second entitle "The Liner Notes" (probably my favorite) provides a sort of intermission from the plot to explore themes of pop music culture also seen in other chapters. Overall, "Fortress" is a distinctly unique experience.

My recent trip to NY helped me appreciate this book more than when I read it. Its best feature was a revealing look at the graffiti subculture in the big city. As I rode through Queens on the way to Shea Stadium I saw the wall-sized graffiti and felt I knew more about how it all came about.

The superhero side of "Fortress" was not quite so convincing. Generally I like magical realism---"A Winter's Tale" by Mark Helprin even used this technique effectively in New York City. Somehow it just didn't fit in the gritty tale of a white boy growing up in the ghetto.

Paul Auster meet Spike Lee. Crumb meet The Lord Of The Ring. The Supremes meet Eno.

Dylan meet Gus.

You may pass safely by the stoops and avoid the yokes. You may look up the sky and Marvel at Aeroman. Your story may end up under of over Dose's.

But you never grow up. You either become an eternal adolescent detainee (do not pass go to the college - collect $200 other ways) or the shadow of an adult pretending to be amphibian but unable to breathe far away from Brooklin.

Jonathan Lethem's walk on the wild side of the pavement echoes Lou Reed's NYC : "at the count of three - I hope I can disappear - and fly fly away, from this dirty boulevard".

The writing in this childhood memoir is fantastic, magically poetic at times. Lethem conveys with rich clarity the terror, the neediness, the occasional thrills of a white boy in an overwhelmingly black and Puerto Rican neighborhood. The omniscient viewpoint is jarring at times - Dylan is much more richly realized than the other characters whose minds we inhabit - but it is effective as it helps build up this hyper-real density. Dylan is fantastic. Lethem inhabits the mind of an elementary and middle school child with utterly convincing insight.

However, this is not exactly a page-turner. There is no real plot, at least in the first half of the book, and experiences lasting only ten seconds can fill out a whole page or more. Perhaps if I'd been on vacation I could have taken in the whole book, but reading it in bed after a long day was heavy going at times.

In fact I quit about half way through, as I had to return it to the library. I really think I'd had enough anyway. Looking at other reviews, I gather the second half gets weird, and I'm not sure I like the sound of where it goes.

Anyway, Jonathan Lethem is an incredibly gifted writer - all credit to him for this ambitious novel.

I stumbled across this in a waterstones one day and had to read it. It is a rich and engrossing story, told with real style. I found it akin to Philip Roth in ways, but no doubt Lethem is a voice to be listened to. The story is woven in a way that has you sitting for hours, not wanting to leave the world and images he paints.

Highly recommended.

The characterizations are brilliant, including the living character of Brooklyn. The dialogue is unerring. The tracing of the arc of childhood and adolescence is remarkable. The protagonist is Dylan, and his process and quests and divisions and disappointments and challenges and growth are humorous and heart-breaking. The magical realism expands the book into the realm of the soul. The book rewarded every hour I spent with it. Kudos to the author for his art.

Don't believe the hype. Johnathan Lethem has many strengths as a writer but they are not on full display within the pages of Fortess of Solitude. The book is a mediation on the lonliness and isolation which plaugues every one of the main characters in this book as they each deal with the changes happening within their Brooklyn neighborhood. Brooklyn is treated more like a character within these pages than the people that in habit it. If you're expecting much in the way of character development or a less than easily foreseeable plot you'll be waiting. None of the potentially interesting characters develop beyond the limits of Lethem's narrative, which is too exposition heavy. The final 200 pages jump and peter way it's way out. Instead do yourself a favor--check out Craig Clevenger's riviting 'The Contortionist's Handbook'.

I loved this book. I cannot recommend it to someone who is not familiar with Lethem's other books. It moves at a slow pace, but that didn't bother me as I was really trying to absorb Lethem's style of writing. I felt myself becoming really bonded with Dylan, the main character. I also felt myself really rooting for him to find happiness in his life. Another reason I really liked this novel was because I am familiar with the neighborhoods the majority of the story takes place in. I was sad to see the story end because of how much I enjoyed it.

I loved Motherless Brooklyn. And I thoroughly enjoyed Gun, With Occasional Music and As She Climbed Across the Table. I had high hopes for Fortress of Solitude, especially because of critics' comparisons with Kavalier & Klay.

However, excruciating detail is not a substitute for plot or, more importantly, character development. Unlike Lionel Essrog (of Motherless Brooklyn) or even the "Lack" (of As She Climbed Across the Table), Dylan Ebdus is nothing but a sieve for long-winded overwrought descriptions of 1970s Brooklyn.

Fortress of Solitude is, put simply, obsessively overwritten.

aeroman is dead; long live aeroman! another chapter in lethem's motherless brooklyn theme, Fortress of Solitude will transport you into a game of spaldeen on a summer day when you were very young. lethem's writing is lucid and poetic, the characters rounded and seductive and the plot, while lazy and extended like that long-ago summer day, very effective as a bildungsroman. Aeroman's ring of power and Running Crab's postcard commentaries are two unique features of the novel; they require a willful suspension of disbelief that you're willing to grant because lethem is so gifted and convincing. some reviewers criticised the title of the book, but i think it's appropriate, for with all the references to super heroes, it makes sense that dylan should seek (and find, eventually) a fortress of solitude, where he can rest and re-gather, just like superman did.

In one of the most ambitious novels in recent memory, Jonathan Lethem recreates the sights, sounds, textures, and tensions of one block of Dean Street in Brooklyn from the 1970's to the present. Dylan Ebdus, the white child of artistic, hippie parents, and his best friend, Mingus Rude, the son of a cocaine-addicted black singer, face school and neighborhood dangers together. Their world of spaldeens, skully, stickball, wallball, and stoopball exists side by side with the bullying, shakedowns, and outright theft which Dylan must face every day on walks to his school, "a cage for growing, nothing else." Together they collect comic books about superheroes, who, unlike them, have the power to conquer injustice and escape from all threats.

Though they admire Spiderman, they do not like Superman, whom they consider a "flattened reality," an ineffective presence living in his "Fortress of Solitude," much like Dylan's artist father living in his studio. When a homeless man in the neighborhood, jumps from a three-story building and injures himself in an attempt to fly like Superman, Dylan begins to think about Superman as a real, not comic book character, actually emulating him in real life. Descriptions of the neighborhood, the attempts at gentrification, the inadequate public school system, the drug scene, the racial conflicts, and eventually even the prison system all add depth and color to the novel, and Lethem expands this scope even further by presenting a detailed view of pop culture. His unique images are a constant source of surprise and delight.

The novel is a huge and imaginative recreation of growing up in the city in the '70's, but it is not seamless. Dylan's early life is traumatic and is drawn very realistically, so the reader is startled when, at the relatively mature age of thirteen, Dylan becomes obsessed with Superman and wants to emulate him, and when the author segues into the magic realism of flight shortly thereafter, the reader is unprepared for the contrast with the earlier naturalism of the novel. Dylan's lack of curiosity about what happens to Mingus after a horrifying incident at age fourteen leaves the reader wondering about the depth of his feelings, and occasionally the mini-essays, which give color and life to the neighborhood, act as a brake on the action. Dylan as an adult is not very interesting, and Mingus becomes almost a footnote. Still the novel adds a new dimension to Lethem's rapidly growing portfolio of outstanding novels and enhances his reputation as one of America's most exciting young novelists. Mary Whipple

This book is worth reading just to experience Lethem's playfulness and love of language. The way he describes things and strings sentences together is amazing. On the down side,I thought the story was so-so and found 'Motherless Brooklyn' to be better in that regard.

I love the first part, when the main character was a child. It was a really engaging and magical story. To me the book kind of fell flat when it moved on to the adult life of the protagonist. Ah well, I still like the book overall.

I became engrossed in these characters' lives while reading this book. Everything felt so real and unapologetic. The super hero realism was so subtle and incredible it felt real. If you love good, character driven fiction, this book is for you.

I gave this book the old post-graduate-school try, and while aspects of it were interesting, I just didn't find it the story enough compelling enough to make me want to fight through the author's arcane language. If the story and characters are compelling enough, then I will put in the effort to fight through convoluted sentences. I will read VS Naipaul, for instance, because I have found his thoughts to be insightful, and his characters interesting.

Lethem's description of Brooklyn was interesting, but it was so elaborate as to be almost a little overdone. [...]

The only difference is, that I found the childrens book compelling and interesting for my children. It also accomplished what it intended to accomplish and didn't drone on for 500 pages.

I know that Fortress of Solitude got great reviews, but I found it mostly annoying. That's my review.

No car chases, no cliffhangers, and so what? This is a tremendously rich story, the kind of book I hate to see end. The characters are amazing thanks to Lethem's gift for creating a full-scale world with relentless, nuanced, and precise language. Of course there is a plot, but the anticipation is not in seeing what happens, but in how people become themselves. I loved, loved, loved this book.

Lethem has been one of my favorite authors for years - my autographed first edition of Amnesia Moon is one of my prized possessions. I have always found wise themes, effortless metaphor and entertaining prose in his work. I waited for this novel to come out and read many breathless reviews about its profundity. I'm sorry to say I was very disappointed with this book. As a 36 year old music fan growing up around the same time as Lethem and his protagonist in a city (not Brooklyn) split with racism, I recognized the time, place and vibe of this story all too well. I was very curious to get Lethem's point of view on our shared, often misunderstood, coming-of-age era. What I found was many descriptions of period stuff and a protagonist whose most interesting stories come from other people's lives and actions - not his own. The first half of the book was better than the second although I read the whole thing waiting for something to happen to/with Dylan. The story drifted along as Dylan just watched things happen around him. Cut to 15-20 years later and, sadly, nothing has changed. And though there are plenty of pages describing this nothing, nothing continues to happen and the protagonist continues to live vicariously and offensively through other people's experience. Dylan becomes only an annoying 30 something stereotype who needs to get therapy, get over his childhood trauma and deal. He doesn't. While reading this book I wondered where the storytelling suspense, insight and maturity of the earlier Lethem had gone. This book seems self indulgent. I hope the author gets back to crafting good stories again soon and lets Brooklyn go.

Like too many other recent novels, this one seems to have been published without input from an editor. Pop music, drugs, race relations, comic books, 1970s nostalgia, and deep deep Generation Xer navel gazing can be interesting to read about and they can certainly help with marketing. However, littering a "story" with hip topics is not enough. Some genuinely meaningful literary quality-control should go on before a work is published. Criticisms of this book's writing have already been made by earlier the store.com reviewers They are right on and I'm not going to waste time repeating them in order to illustrate my point. Rather I will simply bemoan the fact that, once again, an editor at a big publishing corporation failed to do his/her job.

Lethem has been one of my favorite authors for years - my autographed first edition of Amnesia Moon is one of my prized possessions. I have always found wise themes, effortless metaphor and entertaining prose in his work. I waited for this novel to come out and read many breathless reviews about its profundity. I'm sorry to say I was very disappointed with this book. As a 36 year old music fan growing up around the same time as Lethem and his protagonist in a city (not Brooklyn) split with racism, I recognized the time, place and vibe of this story all too well. I was very curious to get Lethem's point of view on our shared, often misunderstood, coming-of-age era. What I found was many descriptions of period stuff and a protagonist whose most interesting stories come from other people's lives and actions - not his own. The first half of the book was better than the second although I read the whole thing waiting for something to happen to/with Dylan. The story drifted along as Dylan just watched things happen around him. Cut to 15-20 years later and, sadly, nothing has changed. And though there are plenty of pages describing this nothing, nothing continues to happen and the protagonist continues to live vicariously and offensively through other people's experience. Dylan becomes only an annoying 30 something stereotype who needs to get therapy, get over his childhood trauma and deal. He doesn't. While reading this book I wondered where the storytelling suspense, insight and maturity of the earlier Lethem had gone. This book seems self indulgent. I hope the author gets back to crafting good stories again soon and lets Brooklyn go.

Like too many other recent novels, this one seems to have been published without input from an editor. Pop music, drugs, race relations, comic books, 1970s nostalgia, and deep deep Generation Xer navel gazing can be interesting to read about and they can certainly help with marketing. However, littering a "story" with hip topics is not enough. Some genuinely meaningful literary quality-control should go on before a work is published. Criticisms of this book's writing have already been made by earlier the store.com reviewers They are right on and I'm not going to waste time repeating them in order to illustrate my point. Rather I will simply bemoan the fact that, once again, an editor at a big publishing corporation failed to do his/her job.

What am I missing here with all these splendid reviews? You want to read Lethem at his best - "Motherless Brooklyn" is the way to go. Fortress of Solitude was simply painful. Character development left lots to be desired - I never did identify or feel for these people. The level of descriptive detail was downright maddening. A disjointed, slow, uninteresting read to say the least.

THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE is nothing less than stellar. I can't encapsulate my joy and awe for this book in a short review. Lethem weaves gorgeous, unique prose around funny, poignant, perceptive subject matter. I couldn't get enough of this amazing epic; this is truly one of the great American novels.

Having grown up in Brooklyn myself, two short blocks from the setting for this master piece i can tell you it is very true to area and the age. If you grew up in a big city you will appreciate the realism and if you didnt, you will get a taste of what it was like for urban people like me.

I really enjoyed as did many of the members of my book club.

I just finished reading Mrs. Whipple's review and I must say that I could not disagree more with her opinions and points about this book. I had this recommended to me by a co-worker who promised me that I would just love it. I decided to trust her and take a chance, but I am here to tell you not to listen to her or to Mrs. Whipple. First of all, I do not find the book ambitous at all. For ambitious, please look at the works of Tom Clancy. His books are full of chases and intrigue. This book is filled with a bunhc of boring nonsense that is highly unrealistic and boring. First of all, children should not be admiring superheros. Instead, parents should teach their children to admire REAL heros like General Norman Schwarzenkopf and that female marine that was recently captured and set free. The images in the novel were not unique and they did not surprise me or delight me in anyway. I had seen these images before in a hundred books that I would never bother reading because they sound just as boring as this one. I found the character of Dylan to be much more interesting as an adult, which is the book maybe has a foot in the real world of actual life. Maybe the novelist will take my advice and do something he'd be good at, like writing the listing is the telephone book. I'm sure Mrs. Whipple would love it!