Rating: 
Summary: Dean Street = Combray?
Review: Lethem has done it. This may be the best thing he's capable of writing. The first two-thirds of this book ranks with the best American novel-writing, and might be the best portrait of childhood melancholy and victimization since the middle chapters of Joyce's _Portrait_. Even if you don't know Brooklyn, Lethem makes its 1970s nadir vivid. He digs beneath the drugs, violence, filth, and callousness that characterized Gowanus/Boerum Hill at that time to portray movingly what it was like to be a smart (but not brilliant), driven (but not single-minded), motherless white boy in a black and Puerto Rican neighborhood. It's nuanced, sophisticated, and genuinely beautiful in parts. If the last third doesn't live up to the high standard set by the first part, that is almost unavoidable. The first two-thirds of the book evoke a childhood in a particular place and time in a fashion comparable to Proust.
Rating: 
Summary: A mighty but flawed dirge
Review: I'm in two minds about this book. On the one hand I'm conflicted about the novel's style and structure, yet on the other hand I'm in absolute awe of its enormous scope and passion. Fortress of Solitude was just far too over embellished with detail and Lethem's style just seemed out of control. Lethem really needed a good editor to ferret out some of the more long-winded passages, rein his style in, and condense the novel to a more sensible length. Much of Fortress of Solitude is satisfactory for its insight into the sights and sounds of Brooklyn in the 1970's, yet its also frustrating in its intensity. Lethem writes as though he is obsessed with some "Joycean" like force, as though he can't wait to splurge and gorge any thought he ever had onto the printed page. He has a kind of bold, confrontational style, but his work reads like a clunky, turgid school report from his youth. The real star of this book is not Dylan Ebdus or Mingus Rude but the world that they inhabit. Dean Street in the Seventies is a world teetering in the edge - drugs are rife, the yuppies are moving in, gang life proliferates, and a sense of economic decline permeates the area. To is credit, Lethem's descriptions of Dean Street are good - the oil stained body shops and forlorn graffitied warehouses, the sprays of broken glass on the side walks, the Puerto Ricans, the images of the dilapidated brownstones, and the liquor stores. This, after all, is the Seventies and Lethem, to his credit infuses his narrative with references to pop culture - the movie Logan's Run, Star Trek, disco hits, cocaine, and the grooviest pop groups. Lethem periodically intersperses the narrative with pop songs of the period, as the story gradually moves forward into the 80's and 90's. The main problem that I found with this novel is that Lethem never really allows us access to the main characters' inner thoughts. We have some wonderful descriptions of time and place - but I never got the sense that the author was privileging us to what Mingus, Dylan and Arthur were actually thinking, and this is also true of many of the secondary characters. The reader is constantly the observer on in this novel, always on the outside and at all times looking in. On the positive side, Lethem has a good ear for recreating natural conversation and portrays rather adroitly the particular black inflections of the period. But generally though, I found this novel to be a big disappointment, and an over the top, shoddy, and slapdash mess. Fortress of Solitude is all over the place, which is a pity, because Lethem has much passion and zeal as a writer. Michael
Rating:
Summary: A Reviewer's Conundrum
Review: A FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE has been praised in nearly every literary magazine and media form with so much adulation that it seems like a daunting read. And it is. Jonathan Lethem does not believe in letting his reader speed-read the thoughts he has so obviously and painstakingly scribed. For starters this book is 511 pages long - and those pages are on thin paper with small font and mini-margins: this is a major undertaking. But Lethem grabs us so tightly with his eloquent prose and picturesque/picaresque atmosphere that once past the first few pages we are his captives. The story is one of childhood alienation, young lads groping for identity in Brooklyn in the period from 1970 through the 1990s. Dean Street is an African American and Puerto Rican ghetto into which is dropped the nearly solitary white kid Dylan Ebdus. Parented by a strange couple (who in so many ways represent the history of American art in that period), Dylan gradually finds his soul mate Mingus Rude, an African American offspring of drug abusing musicians. The hidden loveliness of Lethem's epic includes the closeness of these two, working out their confrontation with the world by using comic book superhero magic via a ring from Aeroman (in reality a street person they think can fly) which places this adventure metaphorically with other epics like The Ring of the Niebelungen and the Tolkien Ring stories. These boys are lovers for all intents and purposes (even Mingus' father walks in on them during a sexual encounter and treats it with respect). But here all is not fastasy but is instead more grit. The three decades see Dylan pursue college in Vermont and then California while Mingus falls into the trap of crime, killing his own grandfather, and spends the better part this time in jail. It is the final working out of the destinies of these two boys that makes this story not only work but makes it significant in American literature. Many analogies to Huck Finn/Tom Sawyer etc pairings are being touted by readers and those can only be compliments. Lethem lets us learn about street life in Brooklyn - the good and the bad - and also about the history of drugs in America and a solid history of the various movements in popular music and in art. And it is lies the reviewer's conundrum: Lethem can become tedious and self-indulgent, seeming to be bent on destroying the architecture of his own molding. It would have been possible, no - preferable - to confine this story to around 300 pages. At times Lethem perserverates on a topic that is not additive to his story but seems more like establishing his credentials as a "with it writer" and an expert on jive and hiphop dialogue, and pop music scholar. But stay with him (even though the temptation to just speed through copious pages of redundant detail is strong) and in the end, in the last few chapters of the book he pulls every thread together in a cat's purse of intrigue and love that makes the arduous journey to that point well work the effort. An example: "For so long I'd thought that Abraham's [his painter father] legacy was mine: to retreat upstairs, unable or unwilling to sing or fly, only to compile and collect, to sculpt statues of my lost friends, life's real actors , in my Fortress of Solitude." But read the rest for yourself: no one can do this work - or this joy - for you.
Rating:
Summary: Feels like a classic to me
Review: I must admit I was very taken by this book and even though I took my time to read it, the time spent I was truly mesmerized any time I picked it up to read. It's not often that I read fiction where the characters remain stuck in my head and I feel the urge to want to offer them guidance or ways out of their predicaments. But the characters are what make this book. If you are looking for ironclad, tie every little detail up in the end or some melodramatic finish, I don't think you'll find that to be the goal of this book. On the other hand because Letham has been a writer of mystery and science fiction, many of those devices of plot along with some melodrama are entwined into this book with cunning effect. The strengths though are excellent character development, robust narrative, fully realized place and time and the flights of fantasy that together seduce the reader to come along. The language and dialogue always seem at perfect pitch and move things along sometimes at a breakneck pace while the sociolgy never sermonizes nor seems to get in the way of the narrative. Yet it's the kind of novel where you can get lost and another world opens like those classic novels of old that you could take your time to ruminate in and ponder the fate of the characters. . . This is a coming of age story and at the same time a search for one's past. I wonder though, is this more of a man's book? And I'm unsure whether that causes the novel to suffer any. Being a man who lived in and around Boerum Hill, Brooklyn (actually what still remains as Gowanus as I lived for many years in the shadow of the Gowanus houses) I saw first hand what the characters Dylan and Mingus both lived through and of course I see everyday what has happened to the area as of 2003. I wonder if the book has the same resonance for those who hadn't lived through it. . .just visiting wouldn't count. . .
Rating:
Summary: A Portrait of an American Youth
Review: Few literary characters are as close to real as Jonathan Lethem's Dylan Ebdus is in The Fortress of Solitude. Readers will feel they know this Dylan intimately, and will be at times, frustrated, hopeful, and sympathetic as he slowly learns who he is. Lethem has created that rare character whom readers can see, can feel develop as they read, while the character is often unaware and feels lost. Lethem's portrait of Dylan is as rich as James' Portrait of Isabel Archer, but with Lethem's bold confrontation with drugs, the penal system, and most of all, race, in contemporary American culture, Lethem's novel is invaluable in understanding ourselves as Americans.
Rating:
Summary: Ambitious
Review: This is an amitious novel that succeeds on many levels. I thought Lethem's previous work showed some promise, but would not have considered myself a fan. The comparisons to "My Fractured Life" hooked me enough to give old Lethem another try. I can honestly say that Lethem has made me a fan with this book. His use of super hero subplots in the mind of a troubled young man is handled as realistically as Travolta did in "My Fractured Life." The story ballances drama and sadness. It was an ambitious undertaking for Lethem and I applaud him.
Rating:
Summary: A New Genre for Lethem
Review: If you go into this book thinking it should rival Lethem's earlier works, like "As She Climbed Across the Table" or even "Motherless Brooklyn", you may be inclined to dislike it. Why? Because it's NOT sci-fi like his previous novels and it's NOT a mystery plot revolving around enigmatic syndromes. This is a story about two boys lives, about growing up in the city, about the struggles of adolesence. The book is not flawless -- it probably could have been a lot shorter, subtracting all the crap about pop culture and pages about Hollywood. That may be why some people have described the book as 'boring', because Lethem ventures into areas that he has previously avoided. But Lethem's strength is in his command of the language, his ability to craft beautiful, thought provoking sentences yet effectively use them to advance his plot. You can easily race through the book, get to the end, and think it was a waste of time. But IF YOU HAVE A TASTE FOR GOOD LITERATURE, you have to take your time with this book, and really absorb the effect of his writing, his inventiveness and ability to make the mundane tragic and beautiful. It is only then that you can grasp the beauty and reality of this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting to Compare with New Yorker Excerpt
Review: Overall I liked the book a lot. One thing I'm really intrigued by: I, along with many others, apparently, was blown away by the New Yorker excerpt. If you've read both, you know that the NYer piece is actually a distillation of the first 120 pages of the book. Odd that it wasn't an excerpt really. Lethem and the NYer did a fantastic job with that distillation. Here's what's great about the book: culturally and sociologically, it's dead-on. Behavior and speech and ambience ring absolutely true, and it's covering ground I haven't seen covered before. It's also a totally successful introspection of a white person who grows up in a black neighborhood. He's uncompromising in recalling and recording his variegated feelings over an extended time, and that is a great accomplishment. Its flaws, I think, result from its ambitions. He gave himself license to let the language get a little poetic and to let the subject matter surround the various characters' lives. I was definitely tempted to put it down once or twice. But ultimately I found it big and satisfying.
Rating: 
Summary: Sadly Dissapointed
Review: Loved Motherless Brooklyn and was excited by all the reviews this book was getting AND I loved the excerpt published in the NYorker, but sadly this was a big letdown. Lethem's chops have improved and his visual descriptions are often stunning, but there's little else there, not much of a story, nor a novel look at the complexity of gentrification. Why did this get such props from the critics?
Rating:
Summary: Motherless in Brooklyn
Review: *minor spoilers* Now it is Jonathan Lethem's turn to write a "big book." The breakout success of his last novel, Motherless Brooklyn, set the stage for an eagerly anticipated follow-up. As if borrowing from the title of his previous book, Lethem's two protagonists grow up motherless in Brooklyn. One is Dylan Ebdus, whose father is a morose and cloistered artist and whose mother is a frenetic but flaky hippy, who, before she is distracted away from their rugged corner of Brooklyn, is determined to blend her white family seamlessly into the black neighborhood. For Rachel Ebdus, gentrification is a dirty word. Next door lives young Mingus Rude, son of soul superstar Barrett Rude, Jr, a brooding musical genius who permits himself to slide into a sort of secluded decay. The two boys are ostensibly best friends, but as is perhaps more true to life, their adolescent lives intertwine, split apart, and become intimately joined as they make their way warily through a minefield of street-borne dangers. The dangers are different for each boy, more often than not according to skin color, but to say that this is a novel about race would be to simplify in a way that Lethem does not. In the second part of the novel, Dylan is all grown up, and still sorting things out. He doesn't know what it means to have had such a peculiar upbringing, but he knows that if he weren't white, he would probably be in prison like Mingus. His black girlfriend accuses him of collecting poor black people as she looks at his obsessive music collection and mementos from his youth. There is to this book, as there has been to Lethem's others, a supernatural element, a fantastical token that lifts the story from the realm of reality. With the chaos that surrounds them, it comes as no surprise that young Dylan might see a homeless man named Aaron X. Doily fall from the sky, or that, having found Doily secret, that Dylan and Mingus might become a couple of low rent super heroes. This fantasy realm never becomes the point of the story; if anything, it underscores the insurmountable mania of the world around them. Lethem's insistent devotion to music is perhaps a more dominant trope, and the timeframe of the novel allows him to delve into soul and rap and punk in an enjoyably voyeuristic sort of way. It is exciting to watch an author like Lethem put together a largely successful, career-changing type novel. This is a deserving book that a lot of people will read. Look for Lethem to join Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon at the top of the youngish American writers heap.
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