The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem

Mediocre

Overall fairly enjoyable but excessively loquacious and would have been half the length if the author hadn't padded with incidental descriptions at every opportunity. In a more succinct version, perhaps the story and the characters would have held more weight.

Confusingly, the protagonist and occasional narrator, Dylan Ebdus, is by far the weakest character in the book. Lethem's flat, matter-of-fact and, at times, downright cold prose, leaves it easier for the reader to empathise with Dylan's somewhat more interesting friends, such that the passages where they are absent tend to drag for what feels like an eternity.

When this book is good, it shines. The chapters about the super powers, for example, are inspired. Sadly the highlights are few and far between, and the ending is hugely disappointing.

A hidden treasure

I really loved this book. I hadn't heard of the author before, but it hooked me in from the very beginning. In a way it feels like more than one book; as a forty-something I really valued the way the characters grow to maturity and then some.

A great portrayal of how frightening it is to be a kid, too.

I also find it interesting that the main character is Jewish, but that this barely rates a mention; that's how it is for lots of us much of the time.

Utterly brilliant

This is a love it or hate it book. From the minute I dipped into it in a bookshop I was hooked and had to have it, then and there (sorry Amazon).

You don't have to know anything about 70s soul or Brooklyn street culture to love this book. Brooklyn and its jive-talk, and comic-strip heroes, are merely the framework for universal themes of how we use private myths to deal with reality and to fight our way out of our own ghettos. But it's a rich and compelling cultural background nevertheless. Forget about the "great American novel" (what is this obsession? did Dostoevsky set out to write the "great Russian novel" or did he just need to write?) - Lethem can just as well be compared to Joyce in the musicality of his language, and to Spenser in his use of dualities. Jung readers will find plenty of interest in here too.

Who before has dared to make the white kid the victim, not ultimately of black racism but of society's compulsion to outcast difference?

Mammoth though it is, I found this book's structure revealed itself and its dénouement successfully ties in all its strands and myths. You have to like metaphor and signs as a way of reading the world - here they show their primeval force in a dog-eat-dog urban morass. If you liked The Corrections chances are you'll hate this. But to some it will speak out loud and clear.

Yawn...

I totally agree with the first reviewer, I hated this book, right up to the last page I was trying to "get into it" and even then I was expecting some magnificent "pulling together of threads" that just didn't happen.

What is worse, the book is littered with clumsily disguised ideas from other lives, other writing and other "stuff" that is just popular urban folk lore, some examples...

A soul singer who dies a lonely coke addict living with his father who used to be a preacher - what you mean like Marvin Gaye?
School yard block parties where the DJ has a Mohican - what you mean Africa Bambata? (and the description of the block party is ripped straight from "Hip Hop America" by Nelson George)
Most of the stuff about Graffiti you can get from "Style wars"
"The Funk Mob"? - What you mean Parliament Funkadelic??

Yes the "Fantastic Four" were the coolest super hero's and of coarse DC isn't cool (who wants to read about this childhood nonsense when they are 38? I don't! its irrelevant pop culture that has no significance or meaning (at least Lethem doesn't manage to inject any).

Like millions of other blokes Lethem is still kidding himself that knowing all this crap makes him extra cool or different - it doesn't, we all know it - the rest of us wouldn't be so daft as to imagine it will make an interesting book.

I can see why Nick Horny liked it, boring anorak wearing train spotters, the pair of them - grow up! nobody cares how many rare comics or records you owned 30 years ago.

If this is what the average bloke can come up with when they think they can write give me "chick-lit" - reading this book was a total waste of time

Ambitious, flawed... exhilarating

The mercurial Lethem attempts the great Amercian novel and the result, while erratic and uneven, is still a damn fine read, full of invention, intelligence and wonderful prose. An author this talented will almost certainly write better novels - but then, few writers are anywhere near this talented.

Mediocre

Overall fairly enjoyable but excessively loquacious and would have been half the length if the author hadn't padded with incidental descriptions at every opportunity. In a more succinct version, perhaps the story and the characters would have held more weight.

Confusingly, the protagonist and occasional narrator, Dylan Ebdus, is by far the weakest character in the book. Lethem's flat, matter-of-fact and, at times, downright cold prose, leaves it easier for the reader to empathise with Dylan's somewhat more interesting friends, such that the passages where they are absent tend to drag for what feels like an eternity.

When this book is good, it shines. The chapters about the super powers, for example, are inspired. Sadly the highlights are few and far between, and the ending is hugely disappointing.

A hidden treasure

I really loved this book. I hadn't heard of the author before, but it hooked me in from the very beginning. In a way it feels like more than one book; as a forty-something I really valued the way the characters grow to maturity and then some.

A great portrayal of how frightening it is to be a kid, too.

I also find it interesting that the main character is Jewish, but that this barely rates a mention; that's how it is for lots of us much of the time.

Utterly brilliant

This is a love it or hate it book. From the minute I dipped into it in a bookshop I was hooked and had to have it, then and there (sorry Amazon).

You don't have to know anything about 70s soul or Brooklyn street culture to love this book. Brooklyn and its jive-talk, and comic-strip heroes, are merely the framework for universal themes of how we use private myths to deal with reality and to fight our way out of our own ghettos. But it's a rich and compelling cultural background nevertheless. Forget about the "great American novel" (what is this obsession? did Dostoevsky set out to write the "great Russian novel" or did he just need to write?) - Lethem can just as well be compared to Joyce in the musicality of his language, and to Spenser in his use of dualities. Jung readers will find plenty of interest in here too.

Who before has dared to make the white kid the victim, not ultimately of black racism but of society's compulsion to outcast difference?

Mammoth though it is, I found this book's structure revealed itself and its dénouement successfully ties in all its strands and myths. You have to like metaphor and signs as a way of reading the world - here they show their primeval force in a dog-eat-dog urban morass. If you liked The Corrections chances are you'll hate this. But to some it will speak out loud and clear.

Yawn...

I totally agree with the first reviewer, I hated this book, right up to the last page I was trying to "get into it" and even then I was expecting some magnificent "pulling together of threads" that just didn't happen.

What is worse, the book is littered with clumsily disguised ideas from other lives, other writing and other "stuff" that is just popular urban folk lore, some examples...

A soul singer who dies a lonely coke addict living with his father who used to be a preacher - what you mean like Marvin Gaye?
School yard block parties where the DJ has a Mohican - what you mean Africa Bambata? (and the description of the block party is ripped straight from "Hip Hop America" by Nelson George)
Most of the stuff about Graffiti you can get from "Style wars"
"The Funk Mob"? - What you mean Parliament Funkadelic??

Yes the "Fantastic Four" were the coolest super hero's and of coarse DC isn't cool (who wants to read about this childhood nonsense when they are 38? I don't! its irrelevant pop culture that has no significance or meaning (at least Lethem doesn't manage to inject any).

Like millions of other blokes Lethem is still kidding himself that knowing all this crap makes him extra cool or different - it doesn't, we all know it - the rest of us wouldn't be so daft as to imagine it will make an interesting book.

I can see why Nick Horny liked it, boring anorak wearing train spotters, the pair of them - grow up! nobody cares how many rare comics or records you owned 30 years ago.

If this is what the average bloke can come up with when they think they can write give me "chick-lit" - reading this book was a total waste of time

Ambitious, flawed... exhilarating

The mercurial Lethem attempts the great Amercian novel and the result, while erratic and uneven, is still a damn fine read, full of invention, intelligence and wonderful prose. An author this talented will almost certainly write better novels - but then, few writers are anywhere near this talented.