Books
Flight of fancy. Jonathan Lethem's novel about growing up in Brooklyn during the 1970s is thrilling, but also highly eccentric, discovers Peter Bradshaw
Published 19 January 2004
The Fortress of Solitude
Jonathan Lethem Faber & Faber, 511pp, £12.99
ISBN 0571219330
It has been many years since magical realism was fashionable in fiction. This maddeningly readable and utterly baffling novel by Jonathan Lethem isn't magical realism, it's - well, I don't know quite how to describe it. Realist magicism? Realism with a side order of magic?
Lethem is the author of Motherless Brooklyn, the funky tale of an orphaned Tourette's sufferer hired by a local wise guy to join his detective agency. This new novel returns us to the same neighbourhood, Brooklyn, for a 1970s childhood, recalled in extravagant and passionate detail. Dylan Ebdus is a white boy (his family part of a tiny minority locally), the son of a bohemian artist father who paints shapes directly on to celluloid, frame by painstaking frame, in a studio that his son compares to Superman's ascetic Fortress of Solitude. Dylan's mother has fled. He forms a friendship with a black kid and fellow comics enthusiast, Mingus Rude, who lives with his divorced father, the reclusive drug-addicted soul singer Barrett Rude Jr.
"Dylan and Mingus lived in a motherless realm, full of secrets," writes Lethem. From Mingus, Dylan learns about the real life of Brooklyn, about the culture of tagging and the overt and covert gang turf war conducted in graffiti across subway cars and deserted buildings. But without any help from Mingus, he learns what to expect - as just about the only white boy at his school - from other black kids. This is the exquisite cruelty of "yoking": being taunted, bullied and finally grabbed in a headlock while every dollar is removed from the pockets of your jeans. Years later at college, Dylan will demonstrate a "yoking" to a white co-ed thrilled by this piece of reality. The effect will be deeply erotic.
Barrett's father (Mingus's grandfather), an itinerant preacher and ne'er-do-well who styles himself as "Reverend", has just got out of prison and is staying in the Rude family home, where saucer-eyed Dylan often comes to hang out. But the old man proclaims himself disgusted by the drug-taking and general immorality, and declares: "I regret to say my only son is courting Satan. He and I will come to blows or something worse." A gunshot ends the first half of the book and with captivating bravura, Lethem whisks us forward into the boys' adulthood in the 1990s, by which point Mingus has drifted into crack and crime. We begin with the scholarly sleeve note written by Dylan, now a failed music journalist, for a CD boxed set of the works of Barrett Rude Jr.
Everything about Mingus's and Dylan's lives in 1970s Brooklyn is realised in distinctively and thrillingly American prose: sinewy, vivid, tougher than leather. Their upbringing has clear literary antecedents in Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, and in fact, Lethem playfully lets you notice resemblances to Portnoy's Complaint until he finally puts you out of your misery with a direct reference: "Once I was on mescaline and I whacked off into a liverwurst sandwich, just because I read about it in a book." (The literary life of our own sinking island is noticed with casual disdain: Dylan's boss tells him that his sleeve-note piece on soul music is so clueless and lacking in real contemporary insight that it's "like something those British writers would do".)
None of this gives you any sense of what is so bizarre about the book. When Dylan is still a small child, he is given a ring by an old vagrant which invests him with the ability to fly like Superman. Dylan and Mingus share the ring and devote themselves - when they can be bothered, or when they're not distracted by other pursuits - to fighting crime, flying down from the skies to attack muggers and villains. Furthermore, the ring confers the ability to travel underwater without oxygen and, later, to become invisible.
I absorbed this only after much rereading and goggling and eye-knuckling, so casually does Lethem introduce the revelation, in a storyline that often seems ancillary to the rest of the novel. Just as a legendary crowd once shouted, "Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Superman!" - I found myself gasping: "Is it a metaphor? Is it a delusion? No, it's really happening!" Mingus and Dylan really do get to have super-powers. But instead of becoming obsessed with the ring's intoxicating possibilities, instead of using it day and night to become rich and famous, Dylan and Mingus treat their astounding acquisition lightly. The ring moulders in cupboards for long periods. After every 30 or so pages of Dylan and Mingus muddling along, I would feel like yelling: "But wait, you guys can fly!"
The nearest equivalent to this I have read recently is Nicholson Baker's much-reviled fantasy-realist novel from 1994, The Fermata, whose hero, Arno Strine, discovers he has the ability to freeze-frame time and uses it to interfere with women. (Something similar happens here when the invisible Dylan breaks in to jail to visit Mingus and finds himself leching at secret close quarters over a female corrections officer.) But this occult ability dominates The Fermata and revolutionises Arno's life. It also gives occasion to much virtuoso prose, describing what it is like to, say, wade through time-frozen surf. Lethem is not interested in the purely writerly challenge of evoking human flight, although his prose performance is more often than not superb. The ring does have metaphorical properties, focusing - not very sharply - ideas about race, culture and class. But it is also supposed to be real.
Lethem perhaps thought this would add a transcendentally comic element to a conventional novel about friendship, boyhood and adulthood: the result is eccentric. At the end, I didn't believe a man can fly. But Lethem's writing certainly does.
Peter Bradshaw's latest novel is Dr Sweet and His Daughter (Picador)
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