The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem
The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem
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The Fortress of Solitude

Author: Jonathan Lethem

Narrator: David Aaron Baker

Unabridged: 18 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/16/2003

Synopsis

This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification."

This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most simple human decisions—what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch money—are laden with potential political, social and racial disaster. This is the story of 1990s America, when no one cared anymore.

This is the story of punk, that easy white rebellion, and crack, that monstrous plague. This is the story of the loneliness of the avant-garde artist and the exuberance of the graffiti artist.

This is the story of what would happen if two teenaged boys obsessed with comic book heroes actually had superpowers: They would screw up their lives.

This is the story of joyous afternoons of stickball and dreaded years of schoolyard extortion. This is the story of belonging to a society that doesn't accept you. This is the story of prison and of college, of Brooklyn and Berkeley, of soul and rap, of murder and redemption.

This is the story Jonathan Lethem was born to tell. This is THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE.

About The Author

Jonathan Lethem is the author of five novels, including Gun, With Occasion Music, and Girl in Landscape. His most recent, Motherless Brooklyn, was named Novel of the Year by Esquire and won The National Book Critics Circle Award and the Salon Book Award. He is also the author of the story collection, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye and the novella This Shape We’re In. He edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, guest-edited The Year’s Best Music Writing 2002, and was the founding fiction editor of Fence Magazine. His writings have appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, McSweeney’s, and many other periodicals. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Violet on February 19, 2017

Fortress of Solitude depicts a world in which there is no such thing as a responsible adult. It might be deemed a coming of age novel except its two central characters, Dylan (white) and Mingus (black), whom we meet when they are both twelve, never grow up even though by the end of the novel they ar......more

Goodreads review by MJ on November 15, 2021

As a rule, I veer far from anything with “coming-of-age” smells, so falling into this near 600-page monster in which Lethem autofictionalises his childhood in painstaking detail was something of an act of readerly carelessness, where this reader almost howled at the umpteenth use of ‘spaldeen’ and ‘......more

Goodreads review by Patrick on April 07, 2010

I half expected to find that Jonathan Lethem is one of those authors that readers either love or hate, but was surprised by how mad the people who hate him are. Personally, I fall into the former camp - those who love Mr. Lethem's work. Let me explain why. Jonathan Lethem creates the most absurd scen......more

Goodreads review by Mattia on October 21, 2016

Video-review: [URL not allowed] An epic tale of gentrification and crushed hopes, The Fortress of Solitude is one of the densest books I've ever read, each page packed with lives and dreams and misery. It's depressing as fuck and crazy on so many levels, but for the sheer glow......more

Goodreads review by Ian on February 25, 2021

CRITIQUE: About the Stars This novel and review had me perplexed. I regard myself as a Lethem fan, basically because I loved "As She Climbed Across the Table" so much. However, both on my first pre-GR reading (in 2007) and my recent re-reading of this novel, I was relatively disappointed. This time,......more

Quotes

“Lethem has done a number of things here, any one of which is impossible for any but the very finest novelists. He has vividly and lovingly and truthfully, through thrilling evocation of its music, its popular culture, its street games, argot, pharmacology, social mores and racial politics, recreated a world, a moment in history that I would have thought lost and irrecoverable. He has created, in young Dylan, a genuine literary hero. He has reinvented and reinvigorated the myths of the superhero, of black-white relations, of New York City itself.  But most of all, from my point of view, he captures precisely–as only a great novelist can–how it feels to love the world that is, on a daily basis, kicking your ass.”
--Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Wonder Boys


“THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE is luminous, stinging with truth and life. A story of two boys, a Brooklyn story, an American story that gives in its very specificity the force of the universal.”
--Paula Fox, author of Desperate Characters and Borrowed Finery


"Wondrous and sweeping, this story evokes perfectly the nuances of friendship and the often odd arrangement called family. The drum of loss beats poignantly beneath the surface, as this tale moves from the streets of Brooklyn to the West Coast and back, presenting us the with baffling and tender gift of acceptance."
--Elizabeth Strout, author of Amy and Isabelle

"The Fortress of Solitude is a grim, brave, soaring American masterpiece."
--Richard Russo

Awards

  • IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
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