I've been making a conscious effort over the past couple of years to read books by authors who are not white males. It's been very worthwhile for me to read perspectives about life that come from people who don't look like me. And while that approach hasn't been foolproof, it's for the most part protected me from reading whiny, masturbatory crap like The Fortress of Solitude.
As a person who spent a lot of years feeling sorry for himself because he wasn't treated nicely by a lot of his peers in middle and high school, I can relate to Lethem's stand-in in this autobiographical novel, Dylan Ebdus, who spends a really large portion of this 500+ page book complaining about being beat by black kids as a white kid growing up in Brooklyn. However, it's become abundantly clear to me as I've grown into adulthood that most people were (or think they were) bullied when they were kids. And, like a poker bad-beat story or a tough fantasy sports loss, it's pretty boring to hear about another fairly-privileged person talk about how rough they had it as a child. When it's set against the crushing poverty that surrounds Ebdus, though, it's really tough to corral enough sympathy to stick with the story.
The first half of the book takes Ebdus from his early-'70s toddler-hood through high school, raised solo by a taciturn father who condescends to make money painting pulp novel covers while working on his interminable passion project: a hand-painted avant-garde animated film. Ebdus' mother skipped town when he was 5 or 6 to join a commune and occasionally sends cryptic shellfish-punned postcards to her son, but is never seen nor heard from again.
Dylan spends most of his time alternately worshiping and disregarding his neighbor and sometimes best friend Mingus Rude, mixed-race son of Marvin Gaye stand-in Barrett Rude, Jr. Mingus is so much cooler than Dylan it's unclear why they ever spend any time together, but let's just roll with it. When Mingus is avoiding Dylan, he hangs out with even less cool white kid Arthur Lomb. Dylan and Mingus even trade handjobs once in a while, I guess so that no one accused the book of being homophobic? Oh, and there's a ring that grants the wearer superpowers, but why would you want to make that more than a tangential plot point?
The second part of the book opens with Ebdus as an insufferably self-absorbed 30-something freelance music journalist (picture John Cusack's character in High Fidelity after the credits roll, but with more coke) pitching a movie about a black convict band to a Hollywood studio exec. If you were hoping Lethem would spare us the details of how we got there, you will be sorely disappointed. Did he also feel alienated at his fancy Vermont college before getting kicked out after a semester for dealing coke? You better believe it. Do he and his black girlfriend make each other miserable? Oh yes. Does he go to the trouble of making any of the non-white characters fully human or with any redeeming qualities? Nope. Does he leave his superpower ring on the shelf for more than a decade before using it for one final, tossed-off hurrah? Grrrrrrr, yes. I hate-read the last 200 pages of this book, and I'm so glad that I don't have to spend any more time in the presence of any of these characters.
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