No sleep till Brooklyn

THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE

By Jonathan Lethem

Vintage, 509 pages

Available at National Book Store

Dylan Ebdus is like most kids growing up… in 1970s Brooklyn, that is. He plays stoopball in the summer, listens to the constant chatter of ‘70s hits in the air (that golden-hued era in which the first third of The Fortress of Solitude takes place), and gets “yoked” by African-American youths on a regular basis — a friendly headlock move usually accompanied by a somewhat more urgent request for a dollar.

And occasionally he can fly.

Or maybe not. So much of Jonathan Lethem’s awesome 2003 coming-of-age epic takes place in the “middle space” — that place where dreams are hatched, before and after reality brings everything crashing to the ground — that we can’t be sure.

Dylan’s mom is a restless soul, one who lights out one day from her family’s Brooklyn step-up and is only glimpsed for the rest of the novel in postcards from the edge. Her husband, artist Abraham Ebdus, works on an ongoing project in his upstairs room: hand-painting film frames every single day, one by one by one, for a film that may never be finished and is only rarely, partially, seen in public.

Dylan’s Virgil through this not-so-hellish environment is Mingus Rude, a black teen who takes the white boy under his wing. Rude is the son of a former soul singer now fallen into ruin, Barrett Rude Junior, who himself is the son of a former preacher and convict, living one floor below the Rude residence in Brooklyn. The elder Rude, also fallen on hard times, can’t stomach his son’s former success and current excesses — crack cocaine, mostly, an indulgence that swirls and drags in a number of those in the neighborhood.

Dylan — obviously named by hippie parents — is sent to an all-black public school by his liberal mom, an “experiment” that makes him the target of marauding Afro-American teens, but it also toughens up his sense of reality. With Mingus leading the way, the two embark on a mini-career of graffiti marking, Mingus posting his tag, “Dose,” on subway trains and even high up on the Brooklyn House of Detention. As Fortress of Solitude leaves behind the ‘70s and rolls into the ‘80s and ‘90s, the music changes, the styles change, but people just keep on learning.

This is Lethem’s first pure opus of life in that strange alternate universe that Spike Lee calls “Crooklyn,” and it’s packed with life, energy, surprise. The language crackles like James Joyce on a good day. Music is a constant thread, as Lethem walks us through the birth of hip-hop culture at block parties, rappers just wielding a mic over records as a new world unfolds. Musical references range from the unusual and obscure (Genesis, Brian Eno) to the comical and apropos (Wild Cherry’s Play That Funky Music). As Dylan finds his identity, then loses it a number of times, the world changes around him, and Lethem captures it with all the beauty of a Spaldeen ball arcing off a porch stoop. You really come to see right inside Mingus, Barrett, Abraham and Dylan, all their dreams as translucent as a page.

When Mingus falls into the same traps his father does, he ends up pulling a trigger in a scene that echoes, then rewrites, the real-life tragic ending of Marvin Gaye at the hand of his gun-wielding preacher dad. Dylan meanders through college afterward, writing liner notes for soul CD collections, gaining a tiny reputation as a writer, as his own father, Abraham, gains a certain mega-geek fame as a popular illustrator of SF novels (though his true, unfinished work remains the painted film frames). Mingus meanwhile follows the unfortunate path of many urban African-Americans in the ‘80s, ending up behind bars.

But Lethem is as compassionate about those inside as he is about those on the outside. His depiction of Mingus in prison is as forgiving and poetic as Denis Johnson’s great novel Angels. Prison may not be as noble as all this, but literature is allowed to be so, if it can shine a light on the human condition that is neither sentimental nor damning.

At the root of the Mingus and Dylan story is a kind of superhero saga: coming into possession of a special ring and a cape left behind by a dying hospital-bed derelict who Dylan believes could fly, the two discover the superpowers these two items possess: maybe it’s just the exuberance of youth, the ability to believe you can do anything, but for a brief moment, in the late ‘70s, Dylan and Mingus take turns at being Aeroman, a flying crimefighter of the city (a plotline that the comic book Kick-Ass would later lift for its own ends).

In a way, The Fortress of Solitude is science fiction as well, pointing out the black hole of time, the way a certain period of our lives continues to exert a disproportionate tug on our thoughts, our emotions, our true being, throughout our lives. The last few pages, in which Dylan recollects being driven home in a snowstorm by his father after being kicked out of Camden College, are condensed like carbon into a diamond, revealing the most beautiful lines I’ve read in some time; yet they won’t resonate — won’t “fly” — unless you’ve read every other word that comes before it:

Brian Eno sang How can moments go so slowly? as we drove through the storm. Abraham and I let ourselves be swept through the blurred tunnel, beyond rescue but calm for an instant, settled in our task, a father driving his son home to Dean Street. There was no Mingus Rude or Barrett Rude Junior with us there, no Running Crab postcard or letter from Camden College pushed through the slot. We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side-by-side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream.