The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem

“What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?”

Dylan Ebdus grows up in 1970's Brooklyn, one of the only white children in his run down neighborhood.  His father is a reclusive avant-garde artist, working on an film project that will never be completed; his mother Rachel runs off with another man early on in the book.  Inasmuch as that is completely at odds with the way I grew up, I related to Dylan like few other fictional characters I have been acquainted with. 




Lethem throws a ton of pop culture from the 70's and 80's at you over the course of this sprawling book.  Dylan acquires a love of comic books from the man Rachel ends up with.  Besides providing the title of the book, this also leads Dylan to Mingus Rude, the son of a faded, drugged soul singer, who becomes Dylan's best friend growing up.  Though, in a book that is exceptionally keen to the unspoken rules of race relations, there are always qualifiers on their friendship.  Even after Dylan grows out of his dorky white kid early years, he still will be an outsider in his own neighborhood.


There's so much going on in this book - Rachel, though she is gone, remains a presence in Dylan's life for many years through the postcards she sends, always encouraging Dylan.  His father, who, despite living with Dylan and being his sole means of support, is almost a non-existent part of his life, holed up in his room working on his project.  In order to support his son, he eventually accepts some work designing covers of science fiction novels and despite himself, becomes celebrated in that community.  Dylan and Mingus traverse their separate paths through adolescence and their teen years, sometimes together, sometimes apart.  There's always music to bring them together, along with the comic books and tagging.  Dylan also comes into possession of a magic ring.  In a nod to experiencing the other's life, he ring makes Dylan invisible, while it allows Mingus to fly and reach unreachable heights.  Each has their own path to follow, emblematic of the differences in opportunities available to each because of their skin.  Dylan, through the help of a teacher, ends up getting admitted to Stuyvesant High, a academically rigorous high school, and eventually Camden College (the fictional college of a bunch of novels, and which seems to shift novel to novel between Vermont and New Hampshire, and sometimes goes by Hampden, depending on the writer).  Dylan develops a drug habit (its the 80's, so cocaine is the choice), while Mingus remains back in the old neighborhood, and is a dealer for the same. 


As with real life, its the dealer, not the user, who gets in trouble with the law (or is it the black, not the white?), and Dylan carries out a wild attempt to free Mingus from prison that does not go exactly as planned, and mainly reinforces the guilt Dylan feels.


This is a story where I was fascinated with the details, populated with people who care about the same things I did and still do.  While fully integrating into one giant melting pot seems at times impossible, we are much better people for making the attempt to try and break down walls and mix with one another.