Rating: 
Summary: exceptionally good
Review: i finished johnathan lethem's "the fortress of solitude" today, and i'm trying to comprehend what he tried to pull off and if in fact he pulled it off. i don't think so, not completely, but he came damned close. the first 300 pages are near perfect, but the last 200, while hugely enjoyable and totally readable, wobble, especially the last 50, where lethem may have tried too hard. but god bless him for trying. and, as i said, he almost manages it. god bless him for that too.it is an amazing book in many ways, a junk drawer full of childhood memories, circa the mid- to late-1970s, specific to brooklyn but in many ways universal. it's a knowing, unblinking look at race relations and friendship and music (especially music!) and puberty and drugs and pretty much anything else you can name. the friendship between the white dylan (a product of liberal guilt) and the black mingus (a product of the streets that liberal guilt could never fix) is heartbreaking and feels right and real. the language is straightforward except when it's startlingly poetic, but still absolutely right, not flashy, not a conceit. but, amid all the grime and the crime and the growing-up stuff in the book's first half and the remembering and the regret and the emotional paralysis in its second half, there is a subplot that at first i couldn't accept that lethem meant to be taken at face value. yet there it was, with no apologies. we are asked to believe that over the course of 30 years, the boys, mad about comic books in their youth, share possession of a ring that allows them, sort of, to first fly like a superhero, then, more successfully, to disappear. try as i might to convince myself these were purely symbolic acts, i finally had to accept the fact that people do fly here, in brooklyn and beyond, except when they don't, crash-landing with varying, ultimately lethal results. it doesn't quite work in the final analysis. but it comes oh-so-close. and in a way the "failure" doesn't matter. the first two-thirds of "the fortress of solitude" are so spectacularly, achingly successful that nothing that could happen in the final third - which also is very strong despite the unexpected aeronautics - would make this anything other than an exceptionally good, okay great - there i've said it - novel. i recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: Huh?
Review: What am I missing here with all these splendid reviews? You want to read Lethem at his best - "Motherless Brooklyn" is the way to go. Fortress of Solitude was simply painful. Character development left lots to be desired - I never did identify or feel for these people. The level of descriptive detail was downright maddening. A disjointed, slow, uninteresting read to say the least.
Rating:
Summary: excellent and still with me weeks later
Review: I loved this book. It's three sections are vastly different but each is brilliant in its own way. It's beautifully written throughout with gems of sentences. The characters are so perfectly drawn, as are the time, the music, the drugs and all the growing up stuff. I know people have felt it's slow but I was riveted from moment one.
Rating: 
Summary: Slow and unexciting.
Review: I expected a book I couldn't put down, so was disappointed. A little boring.
Rating:
Summary: Loved It!
Review: If you liked "Atonement" (four stars) or "My Fractured Life" (five stars) then you will like "The Fortress of Solitude" (five stars). I personally loved this book.
Rating:
Summary: Coming of Age: Superheroes and Yokings
Review: Lethem has been called many things: a postmodernist, a wildly inventive novelist, a master of mixing and matching genres. These statements have all been true, in one way or another. Now Mr. Lethem proves he may one day write the great American novel, and is off to a fantastic start with "The Fortress of Solitude", a novel which owes as much to Dickens as to Lethem's hero, Dick.
Lethem presents the novel in three parts: Underberg, a third person account of Brooklyn, beginning in the 70s, Liner Notes, the jacket of an album written by the protagonist, Dylan Ebdus, and The Prisonaires, a first person narrative by Dylan, who is returning home to finally come to terms with his past.
The strongest storytelling is found in part one. Through the omnipotent, unbiased narrator, the reader is given a perfect painting of time and place, as well as some of the finest drawn characters Lethem has ever created. You can hear the music, see the clothes, and even smell the smells. The creations of Abraham Ebdus, an artist who is working on a film that may never be completed while designing sci-fi paperback book covers for money, and Barret Rude, Jr., a singer who has locked himself away in addiction, are truly masterful. The air of melancholy and fractured dreams is tangible and wonderfully moving.
Many critics were flabbergasted by Lethem's audacity to have his two protagonists acquire super powers from a ring given to them by a homeless man. These critics are missing the point. This subplot of every day people dealing with extraordinary gifts is completely woven into the thematic structure of the entire dramatic engine---we human beings, by the very nature of being human, are limited by our very humanity, despite our best intentions.
What is perhaps more audacious than this tricky literary feat, is Lethem's head-on, and often blunt manner in dealing with race. Dylan, the only white boy in his neighborhood, is the target for countless "yokings", and other tortures, though his best friend, Mingus Rude, who happens to be black, does his best to protect him. There is a telling moment in part three where an adult Mingus recalls his participation in a yoking, how he was responsible for the "mean" face. Dylan counters by wondering when exactly a black boy learns he's scary.
In short, Lethem gives us a startling portrait of human beings with tremendous flaws, who are redeemed by moments of grace. We forgive them, because their struggles to make it day by day mirror our own.
Rating: 
Summary: Well written and compelling
Review: Lethem is a captivating writer and he does a great job of bringing you into the experience of a white kid growing up in a mostly black neighborhood during the 1970s.
"Fortress of Solitude" is an insightful work, bittersweet in many ways, as it removes the veneer of race relations in the post-civil rights movement, to reveal the harsher realities that some had to endure.
I would recommend this book both as a fine literary experience as well as a socialogical masterpiece. It is well worth your time.
Rating:
Summary: Well Written, but nothing special
Review: Jonathan Lethem writes exceptionally well, creates intricate, believable, and sympathetic characters. He paints scenarios and dialogue that have the effect of bringing the reader into his world and even enabling the reader to claim a stake in the outcome.
On the other hand, in "Fortress of Solitude", the story, where there is one, develops slowly and begrudgingly. At times I was unable to identify what the book was really even about. The answer--what the book is about--is buried in touching chapters that invoke themes of racial unity and strife, broken homes, gentrification in 1970s inner city Brooklyn, and one boy's struggle to escape his internal and external demons.
Then there were other sub-plots, fanciful digressions into superhero status and inhuman feats of vigilantism that quite frankly did more to disinterest and confuse me than to engage my imagination.
While I wouldn't recommend this book, I can concede that ultimately I don't regret investing time into it.
Rating:
Summary: 5 Stars despite some quibbles
Review: I enjoyed the quirkiness of "Motherless Brooklyn" and found this book even more of a pleasure. The bulk of the text deals with the 70s and evokes much of that era in terms of mood, race relations, and music. The book also captures the atmosphere of a gentrifying neighborhood and the world of offspring of self-conciously outre' parents. The book is strongest in dealing with Dylan & Mingus' younger years. The prison section proceeds oddly and the very end seems like a "tack-on" drawing on themes from Lethem's other writing. Ditto Robert Woolfolk's death and the lame set-up. For someone whose main character is a music writer, there are odd errors like attributing a Supremes classic to Gladys Knight & the Pips. Also, any place with a Bloomington, Indiana Rural Route is unlikely to be even close to the interstate and the Kinsey Institute's creepiness (a likely byproduct of Hoosier repressiveness) would have helped set-up the oddity of the mother winding up in a southern Indiana commune (though such places existed). Bloomington hipsters are people too narrow and afraid to go some place like New York, and a Brooklyn kid would not have lasted very long there. Unlike other reviewers, I did not find the book particularly slow. Nor did I find it pretentious with regard to its subject matter. The book's lampoons of hipsters (of various stripes), self-indulgent parents, the insularity of Berkeley, the shallowness of music journalism, and the sliminess of real estate people are all on target. Yes, the last 40-50 pages could have re-written or even deleted, but the rest of the book is a great piece of fiction. It captures how difficult it can be to escape our past and how we can overcome the most problematic of attachments. In a very naturalistic way, it also describes the fragility of race relations and manages to make a proto-slacker into a likable protagaonist.
Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful and compelling characters
Review: Like the finest of authors, Jonathan Lethem cracks a hole through time and space to deliver the reader back several decades to a small neighborhood in Brooklyn that has long since vanished in a cloud of gentrification. As someone of a similar age to his main character and having been raised in Brooklyn, I could not help but find his descriptions evocative. As in his previous works, Lethem uses a powerful combination of imagery and finely crafted characters to carry us through his story. Dylan the protagonist and his small world of Dean Street seem so real one could reach out and touch them. Mingus Rude, Dylan's friend and neighbor, offers a powerful foil and often breaks your heart. Indeed, Mingus will linger in my mind for some time as one of the great supporting characters of any novel I've read.
Two things in particular stand out in this work. The first, Lethem's ability to use small details to draw deep lessons will be familiar to readers of his previous work. An example I particularly liked is Dylan's artist father who paints movies, one frame at a time, creating master works that take days to complete seconds. Another great success, Lethem's use of magic akin to the works of the great Latin American authors of the 20th Century deserves particular note and praise. To his credit, the author succeeds where few before him have, folding this concept seamlessly into an American milieu.
If I offer any complaint on the book, it must be Lethem's apparent difficulty ending this magnificent novel. In a work where I hungered for closure, I found myself with none. This may well have been part of the lesson Lethem wished to communicate, but if it was, it was painful to learn.
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