book review
Title: The Fortress of Solitude
Author: Jonathan Letham
# of Pages: 528
Summary (from amazon.com): If there still remains any doubt, this novel confirms Lethem's status as the poet of Brooklyn and of motherless boys. Projected through the prism of race relations, black music and pop art, Lethem's stunning, disturbing and authoritatively observed narrative covers three decades of turbulent events on Dean Street, Brooklyn. When Abraham and Rachel Ebdus arrive there in the early 1970s, they are among the first whites to venture into a mainly black neighborhood that is just beginning to be called Boerum Hill. Abraham is a painter who abandons his craft to construct tiny, virtually indistinguishable movie frames in which nothing happens. Ex-hippie Rachel, a misguided liberal who will soon abandon her family, insists on sending their son, Dylan, to public school, where he stands out like a white flag. Desperately lonely, regularly attacked and abused by the black kids ("yoked," in the parlance), Dylan is saved by his unlikely friendship with his neighbor Mingus Rude, the son of a once-famous black singer, Barnett Rude Jr., who is now into cocaine and rage at the world. The story of Dylan and Mingus, both motherless boys, is one of loyalty and betrayal, and eventually different paths in life. Dylan will become a music journalist, and Mingus, for all his intelligence, kindness, verbal virtuosity and courage, will wind up behind bars. Meanwhile, the plot manages to encompass pop music from punk rock to rap, avant-garde art, graffiti, drug use, gentrification, the New York prison system-and to sing a vibrant, sometimes heartbreaking ballad of Brooklyn throughout. Lethem seems to have devoured the '70s, '80s and '90s-inhaled them whole-and he reproduces them faithfully on the page, in prose as supple as silk and as bright, explosive and illuminating as fireworks. Scary and funny and seriously surreal, the novel hurtles on a trajectory that feels inevitable. By the time Dylan begins to break out of the fortress of solitude that has been his life, readers have shared his pain and understood his dreams.
Opinion: I picked up this book because the combination of a coming of age story with Brooklyn in he 70s was just too much a draw to resist. I loved Letham's writing for most of this book - how he structured the narrative, the style of language, and his descriptions of the city and the bubbling of racial tension underneath were just amazing. It was the last 100 pages of the book however, that I felt were the most difficult to get through. I felt the tone of the book had changed, the style as different as the main character himself by the time we get to that point in the story. I admit, I ended up skipping through a few pages towards the end. In all, I was captivated by most of this book, mostly because the setting was so interesting and engaging, but also because the characters Letham created were so realistic, they could have been my neighbors when I still lived in the Bronx.
Now Reading: And the Mountains Echoed by Khalid Hosseini
x-posted to books