The Fortress of Solitude
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3.6 • 38 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review EDITORS' CHOICE.
From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, comes the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along with games of stoopball, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. Through the knitting and unraveling of the boys' friendship, Lethem creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory.
"A tour de force.... Belongs to a venerable New York literary tradition that stretches back through Go Tell It on the Mountain, A Walker in the City, and Call it Sleep." --The New York Times Magazine
"One of the richest, messiest, most ambitious, most interesting novels of the year.... Lethem grabs and captures 1970s New York City, and he brings it to a story worth telling." --Time
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Jonathan Lethem’s semi-autobiographical novel mostly unfolds within a few Brooklyn blocks, but it covers miles of territory. Two motherless neighbors, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude—white and black, respectively—bond over comic books and graffiti during NYC’s dismal ’70s. But Mingus can’t protect Dylan from ritual bullying any more than Dylan can rescue his friend from a worse fate. Lethem’s writing crackles with authority as he charts the boys’ divergent paths and explores the knotty relationships between fathers and sons, superheroes and mortals, punk and hip-hop, and, ultimately, race and America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
For LITERARY CRITICS only
Let me start by saying that Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn" was one of the best books I have read in years. I thus began this story with hopeful enthusiasm for a repeat great read. Unfortunately, this was not the case. I found his prose this time too wordy, his descriptions of neighborhoods, events,and people too rambling to hold my interest. While portions did resonate I simply no real interest in the protagonist or the other characters. I will try Lethem again but would recommend "Motherless Brooklyn" way over this!