April’s been a pretty light month, writingwise, in this space. I know it. You know it. All it takes is a glum glance at that calendar over there. I’ve been having trouble rustling up the energy or the drive or whatever to tappity-tap something meaningful or not. Change is in the works and that always makes my head spin. And I keep having this feeling that maybe I’ll somehow snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. This is probably my blood sugar talking…
Speaking of which, the defeat-from-victory thing seems to have a special resonance with The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem’s* new magnum opus. (This is highly debatable, in my own mind at least, as Motherless Brooklyn is among my list of best books, ever. If you haven’t read this, or that, please do. Boy, are they ever good!)
I’d been putting off writing about this one, even though it was next in my list, because I’m in awe of it and I have difficulty writing about things that I’m in awe of. Fortress of Solitude concerns the childhood of Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude and aftermath of same, as they grow up in Brooklyn. I grew up in a small beach town in California. For me, this tale of childhood in Brooklyn might as well be set in France or China, for all the similarities it has to my own life. In Lethem’s hands, Brooklyn becomes a magically weird place.
The story is perfectly deliriously mundane, except for the inclusion of a Ring of Power, which allows the wearer to fly (intermittently) among other things. The amazing thing about Lethem, is that he grafts this superheroic element seamlessly into the world of the story. It’s good to see a writer pushing the limits of “realistic” fiction. Prior to this, Lethem has mostly done so from the other side, with books like his sci-fi, western, coming of age story, Girl in Landscape, or his noir, dystopian, drug-capade, Gun, With Occasional Music.
In the end, Lethem describes his book far better than I ever could:
I wanted to write about what we all want and can never have-the ability to rise above our lives, the ability to see our worlds from an impossibly privileged angle, the ability to rescue other people, or ourselves, from fate, the ability to slip between the seams of the world and disappear, to know what others are doing or saying when we’re not present, the ability to change identities. It seems to me that for the purposes of the book I wanted to assert that we’re all wishing to be superheroes, yet the kind of powers we’d wish for change utterly as we fall through one disappointment to the next.
There’s also an excellent interview with Lethem at the Powell’s website, in which he discusses his other books as well and, generally, the directions he’s gone as a writer.
*For years and years I was pronouncing it LEH-thum, when it’s actually more like LEE-thum. Imagine my surprise.
UPDATE:
Interestingly enough, it turns out that Lethem has read more Philip K. Dick than anyone I have ever known:
Here’s that Bookforum link:
Philip K. Dick (1928?82) is the only prolific author whose whole life’s work I can justly claim to have read through twice, picayune exceptions notwithstanding. The fact that my eyes may have passed over on second attack some of the lesser posthumous novels or the massive volumes of letters is surely compensated for by the fact that I’ve reread Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip, A Scanner Darkly, and a couple of other faves three, four, even five times since my discovery of Dick, long ago, at age fifteen.