Why I Hated The Fortress of Solitude, by Erin Flachsbart


Before we get started, I should come right out and say that I'm a Chicagoan. I was born in Chicago, and I have lived here for almost all of my life. I don't know whether this makes me pathetic, or boring, or hopelessly hickish, but it's true. It also has direct bearing on one major reason I hated The Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem -- it's all about New York.

And I could give a damn about New York. Sure, I've been there. People talk fast, and there is a lot of traffic, and movies open there first sometimes, and you can get 24-hour all you can eat sushi. It's a cool big city, but I don't think of it as the acme of all things American, not even after 9-11. In my opinion, if Chicago is considered the stinky beer-swilling also-ran hog armpit of flyover country, New York is the pierced outie belly-button of the East Coast, with a Gothic-letter tattoo underneath it that says "Whatchu lookin' at?".

I am well aware that the U.S. publishing industry is centered in New York. Probably all the people involved in putting Lethem's book onto the market live in New York. This, however, does not mean that the rest of us want to read about New York. A few books about New York here and there -- sure, that's fair. A lot of people live there. I didn't even mind New York so much in Lethem's earlier books. All of which, I note, I have really enjoyed (except for This Shape We're In, which I haven't read).

I mention all of this because it has direct bearing on why I bought the book in the first place, knowing it took place in New York, and yet was still filled with hate -- I like Lethem, I didn't think it would matter, and I got screwed.

Why? In this book, New York appears to be a replacement for plot.

When did setting your book in New York immediately give you some sort of treasured literary cachet? Does mentioning "the East Village" automatically make publishers swoon? A lot of Brooklyn school names and place names and street names are repeated over and over, intoned with religious fervor. Not being a New Yorker, none of these names have any meaning to me whatsoever, except for "Riker's". Any emotional overtone I am supposed to get from the words "Gowanus" or "Delancey" or "Wyckoff Gardens" is totally wasted on me. I understand that the book's supposed to be dealing with a particular, very small neighborhood; but instead of making me feel as if I belonged there, I just felt more alienated every time I was expected to know what Dean Street or Bergen Street was like. It's a snobbery that transcends simple pride in one's hometown.

Alll that aside, the book isn't really about anything, except two kids growing up in New York in the seventies, and fucking up their lives by the nineties. You'd think I'd feel some connection to the seventies part, at least. The white Jewish kid, Dylan, doesn't belong in an all-black section of Brooklyn, gets beaten up by everyone, gets abandoned by his hippie mother, goes to some sort of magnet school, gets into college, flunks out because he's dealing drugs, goes to Berkeley, flunks out, and becomes a... punk liner notes writer. The half-black, half-white kid, Mingus, belongs anywhere he goes, turns into a graffiti virtuoso and drug dealer, shoots his psychotic grandfather, and goes to jail a zillion times. Also, trendily, we get some circle jerks and prison blowjobs, although it's definitely stated that nobody is really gay. All the people Dylan and Mingus know sit on their front stoops for more than twenty years, listening to a lot of obscure doo-wop and funk music. Time passes like a gelatinous cube, gorged on the half-digested bodies of various poor and/or stupid black and Hispanic people, most of whom are still able to rob each other, smoke rock, and croak out "Yo". The book flap says that this book is "riotous", but I don't think I laughed once. Mostly I kept thinking "Good God, when will this book end?" The book flap should have said "If you are not a poor white Brooklynite crackhead who flunked out of Berkeley and loves Brian Eno, do not buy this book."

The book flap also mentions gentrification as a topic that is importantly addressed in the novel. Gentrification, apparently, means starting the book out with a mean old lady who spends a lot of money to remodel some houses, killing her off in the next chapter, and then waiting until the end of the book to mention that there are more white people moving in the neighborhood, and that they're racist. Outside of Dylan not wanting to be white because he gets yoked all the time, there isn't much in the way of "political, social, or racial disaster" until we get to the point where they've both turned into the aforementioned crackheads.

Lethem also gets in his digs at the comics, art, film, and science fiction communities. It isn't ever clear to me whether he's a fan of these communities and is making fun of himself, or if he just wants to ridicule them in his book because he can. Dylan's dad, Abraham, is a failed artist who spends most of his time hand-painting a pomo cel animation opus in the attic while Dylan collects comic books obsessively. A pivotal point in the relationship between Dylan and his father involves a trip to a panel for filmmaker Stan Brakhage. (Ironically, I never would have heard of Brakhage, who taught in Chicago, if it hadn't been for my friend Nick. Nick is probably the only real New Yorker I know, even though he lives in Jersey and is moving to California soon.) Brakhage is characterized as a mysteriously brilliant silent sage, but the entire panel experience is ruined for the characters by the surrounding ring of argumentative name-dropping imbeciles who seethe with jealousy and incompetence. I already knew Lethem wasn't really high on academia as a whole, after reading As She Climbed Across The Table, but this scene wasn't amusing, it was just pointless. Lethem moves on later to making fun of a science fiction convention, where Abraham is being honored against his will for his paperback cover art, which he only does to pay the bills. In fact, Abraham wins a Hugo, which he opens with a steak knife and gives to Dylan to use as a doorstop. You can't make fun of pedantic con-goers, anal comic-book geeks, or avant-garde film poseurs, when you've just ended the previous chapter with an exhaustively detailed liner note and discography of music you made up.

What is this discography? Well, in the middle of the book, without warning, we are treated to thirteen pages of tedious liner notes that Dylan wrote about the singing group that Mingus's dad used to be in (before he became a crackhead too). Immediately after we slog our way through this, Dylan is suddenly narrating in the first person, and we get to see seventeen more pages of him pitching a movie idea to a loathsome Universal Studios executive. The movie is about the Prisonaires, five black guys in prison who sing so well together they get to cut a single with Elvis Presley. There's a whole lot more detail on this, but since it never makes an appearance again for the rest of the book, I wanted to not have wasted my time.

Oh yes. I nearly forgot. There is a magic ring.

The magic ring is apparently Lethem's palsied nod to the pulp creativity of his previous books. With the magic ring, Dylan and Mingus can actually fly, even though nobody else ever really sees them. They pretend they are superheroes for a while and battle crime on their turf, until Mingus gets arrested for mistakenly attacking an undercover cop. Later, for no reason, the ring changes its power and confers invisibility. Dylan uses the ring to try and get Mingus out of prison, but Mingus asks Dylan to give it to a hated neighborhood friend of theirs instead. The friend then immediately jumps from the tower and kills himself, since the ring mysteriously doesn't work for him. Then Dylan goes to Indiana, where he fails to find his mother, and the book ends.

This was pretty much the last straw for me. All these things that could have been really cool just ended up as pathetic excuses for symbolism. Not only the ring, but the gentrification issue, the race issue, the treatment of pop music, art, comics, everything -- all of it was meaningless. When I finished the book I was exhausted and angry. I hope that Lethem doesn't make this sort of horrible mistake again. I'm going to have someone test-read his next book for me first, just to make sure. Maybe someone from New York.