Rating: 
Summary: Language Lover
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Read it.
Review: This is wonderful book and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it. Only downside is the inner city language if you're not familiar with it.
Rating: 
Summary: Impressive, But Not Enjoyable
Review: I'm an image maker by profession and am impressed by Mr. Lethem's almost photographically sensitive observations about the physical and cultural artifacts of this location and population. The writing fails to engage over the long haul. It entertains moment by moment with descriptions that are incredibly lucid and easily seen in the mind's eye. However, the story lags and doesn't seem to move anywhere. It's too slow and seems to be trapped in the moment. It reminds me of two gallery photo shows I saw recently. One was by a photographer who is known for powerful single images and the other by a photojournalist who makes stunning single images strung together to generate emotional current. Mr. Lethem delivers the former. I miss the latter in this writing. Too bad. The writing talent is there. Unfortunately in this case it seems to dwell to a point of boredom. Still, the descriptive text, rich with amazing imagery, is almost worth the hair-hurting reading. ---Gary Gladstone
Rating:
Summary: A Fine Book
Review: Fortress of Solitude is a good book that falls somewhere in between the worlds of My Fractured Life and Atonement. There are some pacing issues, but the good elements exceed the slow ones and it is definitely a fine book.
Rating:
Summary: strong moments overshadowed by weaker ones and pace
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: a triumph (mostly)
Review: When people like Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen write about the decline of the American novel, THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE is the kind of book they wish there were more of. This is a big, lovingly written book about pre-gentrification New York, the effects of an absent parent on a child, and the end of a particular subgenre of African-American music. (and that's just for starters)...
What's right: all the little things, the cracks and crevices of the sidewalk outside Dylan's house, the importance of ritual in the stickball games, the realtionships of the bullies to the bullied on Dylan's block, and the best way to store issue #1 of a comic book. The city, the music, and the drugs change as Dylan gets older and it seems Lethem was there for it all.
The central relationship between Dylan and his neighbor Mingus is a bit problematic. Mingus isn't really knowable (perhaps by design), and soon disappears into a cloud of cliche(drugs, prison). By the time Dylan reaches adulthood, it's not clear what hold Mingus still has on him, and the implication of a homosexual attraction feels last minute. The imparting of superpowers to a ring Dylan is given also doesn't quite come off. It's not clear what Lethem is trying to do here, other than parody the kids fondness for comic books.
Still, a novel wriiten with great affection, lives lived honestly, and a journalistic eye for detail. We need more novels (almost) like THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE.
Rating: 
Summary: Yet Another Splendid Novel About Brooklyn From Lethem
Review: "The Fortress of Solitude" is ample confirmation for many of us who regard Jonathan Lethem as among the finest American novelists of our time. It is an engrossing, at times brilliant, evocation of Brooklyn, New York in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Lethem has successfully woven such themes as gentrification, black-white race relations, the rise of crack usage and rock and roll and soul music into a fine novel. While it may lack the sizzling energy and crackling prose of "Motherless Brooklyn" - which still is Lethem's crowning literary achievement - "The Fortress of Solitude" introduces us to yet another engrossing protagonist, Dylan Ebdus, who grows up in a Boerum Hill (downtown Brooklyn) that undergoes a startling transformation from rundown, almost blighted, urban slum to the newest, hippest outpost of urban gentrification. Ebdus matures from an insecure youth hanging out with local gangs to a promising writer of rock and roll and soul music. As an adolescent he strikes up a friendship with Mingus Rude, the troubled son of a down on his luck soul and rock and roll music singer. Together they seek escape from their urban prison through a magic ring which offers its possessor superhuman powers. "The Fortress of Solitude" is by no means a perfect work of fiction, but it is still an engrossing tale of a young man - Dylan Ebdus - who finally finds his way in the world. The first two thirds are often captivating, replete with Lethem's brilliant, occasionally poetic, prose. The last third seems a bit rushed and contrived, as though Lethem was moving too fast to end this complex tale. At times Mingus Rude comes across as a more intriguing character than his friend Dylan, especially in the novel's final chapters. And his descriptions of Stuyvesant High School students seem a bit too far removed from what I remember back in the mid to late 1970's. But these are relatively minor criticisms of what I regard as one of Lethem's best works of fiction. One which I hope you, a fellow customer, will strongly agree.
Rating:
Summary: Bold but flawed
Review: An erudite, humane read about 'whiteboy' Dylan in Brooklyn during the 70's. The writing is gripping but at times scattered. The friendship between Mingus and Dylan is the focal point of the novel yet at times, seems less like a real friendship than a novelist's creation of one. Additionally, the grown-up Dylan is not especially compelling. The tragedy of the book is that Mingus' life is short-changed, especially as his story is the most interesting. Yet, with all my complaints, I really enjoyed this novel and the descriptions of a Brooklyn world I will never know.
Rating:
Summary: An evocation of the '70s and '80s; fascinating
Review: This book describes a boy's growth from a child, living in a rundown neighborhood in brownstone brooklyn, up to his adulthood as a kind of drifter, albeit a productive one. in his early years he meets a number of prototypical characters: the nerdy white kid, who is intimdated by blacks; the black version of himself, whom he becomes friends with; and another black boy, who's bullying takes on more and more sinister forms. Through his eyes we see the life of Stuyvesant kids in the late '70s--spoiled, preening, obsessed with themselves, and myopic in outlook to life. We see punk, only a little; we also get a dead-on description of new England liberal arts colleges (I went to one, and cheered for Lethem's marvelous observations). We see comics with the love junior high boys have for them. And we see graffiti, the romance of train yards and rusted out cars rumbling down Myrtle Avenue, aka "Murder Avenue." This book will appeal to you if you are of a certain age; if you want to discover what NYC was like in the '70s, with sociological accuracy to boot; if race relations intrigue you. Lethem writes with a confident, authoritarian style: all-knowing, all-expansive. While some characters never get much of a chance to reveal hoe they feel, the action and discovery of the thousands of worlds dylan spins through make up for that. I don't see the point of the scene with the movie mogul or the scene in bed with Abby; otherwise, this novel crusied for me. I recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: fortress of inaccessiblity
Review: I sensed that the author partly wrote this book to come to terms with the bullying he experienced in his youth. It's a fascinating angle - reverse racism, but it was not taken to the dimensions it deserved. Bullying produces passivity, silent rage, shame, etc. in its victims, which is a rich vein to write about regardless of the skin color of those involved. But here, it just wasn't developed enough to make me feel more than just pity for Dylan (the narrator and author's stand-in). I agree with those reviewers who said that one problem is that we aren't privy to how the characters actually feel, except in the most general terms. Arthur, for instance, what made him decide to stop being a "good little kid" and become a delinquent? Because "everyone" was doing it, as was suggested. Again, not enough information. Nor were the characters developed sufficiently over the 500 plus pages that the reader could eventually piece together their real motives. "Motherless Brooklyn" was a great book, the experimental prose styles mostly worked there and were perfect for the way the jittery narrator, who had Tourette's Syndrome, experienced the world. Here, the author can't seem to settle on one. He even switches from third to first person for the last half, always a jolt even from the most skilled writer. There are so many coming of age books; it seems like every writer has to get theirs out of his/her system. The thing that irked me was that Lethem had the material to make his story not just another "Portrait of a Sensitive Writer." Oh well.
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