- - - - Copyright 2003 by Men's Journal LLC
- - - - Straight Outta Brooklyn After penning four head-scratchingly inventive novels, all with a sci-fi bent, Jonathan Lethem hit critical pay dirt with 1999's Motherless Brooklyn, a head-scratchingly inventive detective tale set, lovingly, in his native Brooklyn. This month, Lethem returns to that "grubby, enduring" New York borough with The Fortress of Solitude (Doubleday; $26), proving, as his last novel intimated, that Lethem at home is Lethem at his best -- or anyone's best. The Fortress of Solitude follows two pals, white Dylan Ebdus and black Mingus Rude, from their childhoods in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood in the seventies to their troubled and past-haunted adulthoods, and sees them reunited, ultimately, in an upstate New York prison. Swirling around them: rap, punk, graffiti, stickball, egg creams, murder, crack cocaine, and, head-scratchingly, a mysterious ring that endows its wearer with superpowers. One hundred pages in, Lethem evokes Pete Hamill on an acid trip; three hundred pages in, you're reminded of Lethem's ambition-soaked contemporaries Jeffrey Eugenides and Richard Powers; finish the novel and you realize that Lethem is Lethem, all his own. Like Dylan Ebdus's memory of a Brooklyn summer, The Fortress of Solitude is "going to haunt you, play inside your eyelids," long "after . . . your pounding rib cage [is] calmed." --Jonathan Miles - - - -
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