The Fortress of Solitude

1) "Strangely, after Dylan's rapid rise to chief alchemist and philosopher of skully, nobody seemed to want to play the game anymore. Dylan presided over an ideal slate which was persistently shirked, deserted in favor of just about anything including standing around Henry's front yard with hands in pockets, kicking at one another's ankles and saying 'Fuck you, motherfucker.' Perhaps the Dean Street kids had never really been able to keep their attention on skully but only on the attendant crafts, on puzzling out the tradition. So much easier to tell a younger boy that he didn't know to play skully than to have to play him to take his caps away, and what good were the caps anyway? Everybody lost their caps or even perversely threw them at the passing bus to watch them ding harmlessly and go wheeling into the gutter. Maybe skully sucked. Maybe to perfect a thing was to destroy it."

2) "In truth, Superman in his Fortress of Solitude reminded you all too much of Abraham in his high studio, brooding over nothing."

3) "At the end of another winter, lion giving way to lamb, he comes to lie there one day in the long sun and shadows and stays for good, curled into a ball at the corner of Atlantic and Nevins, at a spot on the pavement just short of the street, in front of the never-closed liquor store and the never-open locksmith. Fouled in himself, baked in vomit and urine and sweat, his pants black with it, he lies still as a bog man or mummy preserved in a glass case, eyes shut and mouth rigid, arms wrapped around his middle, fighting the chill of one week before, when he first took the position. He's huddled as if against time itself, enduring the winter that's already passed, his pose a record of pain, a full-body grimace frozen in sunlight. Over his shoulders and tucked under his ass is a child's thin synthetic sleeping bag, feeble cover though if he's alive it must have gotten him through. The sleeping bag's two corners are peeled away in torn strips, exposing cottonoid filler stained gray with street filth, and the two strips meet in a knot under his white-grizzled chin, so the thing weirdly resembles a superhero's cape."

4)" Nevertheless, from the moment he walked into the Philadelphia studio, Barrett Rude Jr. was destined to be a singer of the second type: the secret, soaring voice contained within a famous harmony group. Rude had in the Distinctions found the context within which he could tell the story he had to tell, a place to do the one thing a human being can hope to do---matter for a while. If he regarded it as something like a prison, we can only respectfully disagree, and be grateful that his was an art built on dramas of confinement and escape."

5) "I thought of my namesake's 'Chimes of Freedom'---tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed, for the countless confused accused misused strung-out ones and worse, and for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe! Certainly I'd witnessed gatherings of rock critics or college-radio DJs, on panels at the South by Southwest conference or the CMJ, which were no less self-congratulatorily marginal. Only the costumes were different. I flashed on a vision of a world dotted with conferences, convocations, and 'Cons' of all types, each an engine for converting feelings of inferiority and self-loathing into their opposites."

6) "'So what are you doing later, anyway?'
'Who, me?' Katha's tone of delighted surprise was all I wished to inspire in her, or for that matter in any other living human, ever again. When two bodies felt the raw uncanny instinct to be joined, and before any damage had been exchanged, it was so easy for one to make the other smile."

7) "God's sake, throw me in Riker's before I die!
Invisible in a throng of invisible men, Dose had to step out to get what he needed. Solicit an undercover, or work a routine, the same spot every day, a marathon in the alley behind Tower Records or the doorway of OK Harris Gallery, until someone finally requested the police buff this broken human signature from the urban façade.
Wherever you wandered in Dinkins's boroughs, then Giuliani's, this archipelago city was always changed after your intervals on Riker's, the exile island.
Fuck did the graffiti go?
What was happening when a motherfucker can't even light up a joint on Eighth Street?
Not to call yourself a zombie. But you did stalk an unreal city."

8) "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 a 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."

For some reason, this book sat on my shelf for several years. I'd acquired it, then never got around to it, then completely forgot about it. Honestly, I had no idea what to expect, so I simply started reading.

The title is an allusion to Superman's fortress of solitude, which for protagonist Dylan Ebdus is Dean St. in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. The time period of this tale contributed to my fascination and enjoyment, since Dylan was growing up when I did. His environment, however, was completely different. Watching Dylan negotiate a familiar time period and pop culture from such a foreign perspective kept me absorbed.

Dylan's complex friendship with another neighborhood boy, Mingus Rude, is another enticing plot line. Mingus and Dylan are both growing up without their mothers and both only loosely supervised by their fathers. And yet, they are so different. Mingus the graffiti artist is "Dose," which both he and Dylan paint everywhere, tagging, their way of expressing their existence in such a big city. Later, Dylan meets a homeless man who seems to fly, landing on the ground from three floors up. When he gives Dylan his magic ring, he and Mingus create the superhero Aeroman, but it's Mingus who does all the flying.

The ring, with its special properties, jolted me out of a story that seemed mostly real. Am I, the reader, really to believe that Mingus was flying? Yes, and during the second part of the book, it becomes clear that for Dylan, the ring is a cloaking device. This should not be surprising, since this is what Dylan always wanted to be in Gowanus: invisible. However, there is a reality check: flying and invisibility do not solve their problems.

I found this book a delight to read because I had no idea what to expect next, and it made me care. The Fortress of Solitude is a most intriguing coming of age story that I will be thinking about for some time.

This is probably a better book than I give it credit for. I've spoken before about how much I dislike passive protagonists and books that value a detached, nihilistic atmosphere over story, and this book is a good example of both. The basic outlines of Lethem's story are gripping; a young white boy grows up in a racially conflicted area of Brooklyn during the 1970s, and finds common ground with a young black schoolmate and their mutual admiration of tagging and comic books. I mention tagging first because many reviews of this book don't mention it, and give the impression that comic books are the main theme of the book. By far, the main obsession and gestalt of this book is graffiti. That's not a slight, but by not mentioning it the reviews and blurbs I've seen are guilty of a disservice. Graffiti was a ubiquitous sight in the New York of the 1970s, and perhaps also a large part of Lethem's young life. The scenes dealing with the mechanics and emotions surrounding this activity far outshine those dealing with comics, or the random cruelties of New York's public school system, or indeed anything else in the book. It's thus a shame that this book wasn't at least slightly illustrated; if it were it would be a fantastic fictionalized history of the phenomenon. As it is, it left me a bit cold and unfulfilled at the end.