My last two:
Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem. More or less “meh.” It’s a sprawling mess of a novel with some nice parts, but virtually none of the charm of his earlier work I’ve read (As She Crawled Across The Table, Gun, with Occasional Music, and the beautiful Motherless Brooklyn). Unlike Lethem’s previous efforts, this one’s a coming-of-age story about a thinly disguised Lethem proxy growing up in Brooklyn in the 60s and 70s, and then facing adulthood (there is, of course, a long German word for the form: Bildungsroman). Our hero, Dylan Ebdus, is one of the only white kids in his school (“Not his grade; his whole school,” his mother brags) in the years well before Park Slope became a fashionable neighborhood. Dylan’s best friend is the improbably named Mingus Rude, son of a once-famous R&B singer, whose life takes a very different turn from Dylan’s (obviously).
My personal literary Mendoza line is whether or not I wish I’d used the time reading a book to read something else, and Fortress passes that test, but just barely. Lethem is writing a combo love letter to the Brooklyn of his childhood, to the Manhattan of the 70s, to music (punk and CBGB figure into it, briefly, and there’s a long arc about Rude’s father and early R&B), and most obviously to comic books (though, amusingly, young Dylan is far more into Marvel than DC). His proximity to the material perhaps made him less able to tell what was working and what wasn’t (and this is a man who made SF blended with noir work in the aforementioned Gun, which featured a gun-toting kangaroo as a mob enforcer), and so his focus wavers by halfway through the book. The earlier chapters are much more well-crafted than the novel’s final segments, and the somewhat halfassed magical realism elements fall kind of flat and never enjoy the verve of his prior genre-bending experiments.
Currently Reading: The Looming Tower, about the roots of Islamic fundamentalism and the rise of Al Qaeda. It’s actually very, very compelling, and reads more like a long-form piece of journalism than a book, if that makes any sense. The author, Lawrence Wright, won a Pulitzer for it; I recommend it without reservation if you’re at all curious how we got here. (Hint: It kinda starts with a dickhead named Qutb.)
