Jonathan Lethem is a hell of a novelist. Ever since his Gun, With Occassional Music (the inspiration for me inserting a character who’s “always self-identified as an ewok” in my most-recent novella), I’ve been an enormous fan. Now his new book, Fortress of Solitude is out — and Salon has a great feature review of it.
“Like a match struck in a darkened room,” his novel begins: “Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o’clock on an evening in July.” These are the Solver sisters, Thea and Ana, shining “like a new-struck flame” in the eyes of Dylan Ebdus, the currently five-year-old hero/narrator/recollected protagonist of Lethem’s mighty “Fortress.” The sisters are blond and beautiful, strangers, like Dylan, in a rundown New York neighborhood made up principally of browns and blacks. It’s 1972 and the Solvers are “the new thing, spotlit to start the show … The girls murmured rhymes,” Dylan thinks, or “were murmured rhymes” — it’s hard to tell “in the orange-pink summer dusk, the air and light which hung over the street, over all of Gowanus like the palm of a hand or the inner surface of a seashell.”
Gowanus is a part of Brooklyn, of course, not Krypton or Kandor, and Lethem is the new poet of Brooklyn — the new Whitman, even, whose bold imagination and sheer love of words defy all forms and expectations and place him among this country’s foremost novelists. Five years in the making, “The Fortress of Solitude” is Lethem’s “spiritual autobiography,” proudly claimed as such and following magically on the heels of 1999’s award-winning “Motherless Brooklyn,” the novel that introduced a detective with Tourette’s syndrome to the United States and marked Lethem’s departure from the hybrid but definitely marginal genres in which he’d previously worked — mysteries, westerns and sci-fi’s, sometimes all three at once. To say that Lethem bends the rules, pushes the envelope and extends the possibilities of fiction is to state only part of the case. He’s defiant, delicious, in his refusal to be pinned.