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The San Francisco Panorama.
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- - - - Home Boy
WRITER'S BLOCK Jonathan Lethem stands in front of the Brooklyn house his family moved to when he was four years old.
"So this is the block," Jonathan Lethem says, announcing the six hundred feet of Dean Street that lie at the heart of his masterful new novel, The Fortress of Solitude. The tour guide, the author of 1999's award-winning Motherless Brooklyn, is an energetic thirty-nine-year-old, a recent gym addict, and he walks briskly east from the corner of Bond and Dean Streets. He indicates superior pieces of slate sidewalk, the ones that would be best for drawing street-game boards, while pointing out landmarks. A staunch Brooklynite who can just about get away with wearing his area code on his T-shirt without seeming too self-conscious, Lethem calls this his ur-block. It's where his writing—his six novels and a crop of short stories, essays and introductions‹had its beginnings. He's king of the hybrid, with subjects that have included a detective noir with a Tourette's-afflicted protagonist; a hard-boiled sci-fi mystery with a gangster kangaroo; a "Southern Gothic Western set on Mars" (as Lethem once described it); and pieces about Star Wars, music and amnesia. All of it comes from this leafy Brooklyn street where Lethem's family moved thirty-five years ago. "This is the house I grew up in," Lethem says, "still looking pretty much as it did." The three-story building has a yard that's a little overgrown; a Jeep is parked next to it; there's a dogwood leaning over a tired steelwork fence. "These are all plants that my mother planted, that I remember my mother putting in, the forsythia and stuff." Back when Lethem's mother, Judith, an activist and social worker, was planting forsythia, back when his artist father, Richard, was painting in the attic, the neighborhood was even more of a patchwork—primarily one of black and Hispanic cultures—than it is today. The house and block were oases in a tough proving ground for a bespectacled white kid with a penchant for comic books. "Just from Nevins to Bond Street on Dean Street was a world," Lethem says. "And if you crossed those boundaries, you knew you were in an entire other world." Lethem has kept returning to Dean Street, despite moves to Vermont, to Berkeley, to Toronto. It's not his family that draws him back: His mother died in 1978 and his father sold the house and moved to Maine eight years ago; his brother lives in Manhattan, his sister in Spain. And yet, each time Lethem has returned to Brooklyn, he's found himself living closer to this now-gentrified starting point. After renting his current apartment, a book-choked third-floor walkup about ten minutes away, he found himself walking this stretch of Dean all the time. The block's power, its essence and the memories the walks set off, he says, were amazingly intense; the feelings conveyed were "absolutely indescribable." He describes them nonetheless in the discursive jazz symphony of The Fortress of Solitude. The novel's dominant section is set under the block's ailanthus trees and between its parked cars. Lethem takes strands of his late-1960s-to-late-1970s urban experience and weaves them into a universal tapestry of race and youth and street games and comic books and graffiti and music and drugs and loneliness and betrayal and fantasy and reclamation, and provides an eerie re-creation of the exquisite, excruciating heaven and hell that is childhood. As Fortress begins, Dylan Ebdus is five, a lonely white boy in a brown and black world. He's the only child of a painter father, Abraham, and an idealistic mother with a wild streak, Rachel, who retreats quickly from the book's foreground. Dylan's own retreats are largely into the house; his play on the street is largely forced on him by Rachel. Early, he guiltily recognizes the reality of the racial divide on which he finds himself standing. He tries not to fall in, either on the street or in his schools. He is constantly "yoked," a kind of bullying that stops short of mugging, and spends years giving things up—lunch money, dollars intended for comic books, a new bike—to the threats of reverse-racist violence that hover over him. And yet Dylan's eventual, occasional best friend is Mingus Rude, the elegantly cool son of black soul singer Barrett Rude Jr., who's no longer with Mingus' white mother. Mingus moves to the block just as he's about to start sixth grade, and Dylan fifth. The connection between the two essentially motherless boys will seem, for anyone who's ever had a best childhood friend, achingly accurate. Lethem meticulously details the political complexities of the boys' slight differences in age, the variances in their sympathies with other kids, the mercurial fade-ins and fade-outs of friendship and, always, the tricky navigation required in the racial minefield in which they live. As the boys grow up—connecting on and off through superheroes, drugs, music, sex, art—Lethem manages to match their voices to their ages and experiences, while staying in sync with the eras in which the action unfolds. "I tried to make the social milieu almost documentary," Lethem says, and every page is filled with specific details, from songs girls sing on the street to the way graffiti and hip-hop grew into the culture to the feel of a Spaldeen, a high-bouncing pink rubber ball used for street games of stoopball and stickball. For the more about Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude, and his literary hybrids, please read the complete article "Home Boy" in the September/October issue of Book. Subscribe online, or call 1-800-317-BOOK to subscribe or to order a single issue. Visit Where to Buy Book to find a store near you. - - - -
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