The Fortress of Solitude

I just read a really mean-spirited review of this book by a very critical critic. Personally, I don't think I could ever rip apart something that someone had put so much energy into - something that had so much of a person's actual biography in it, and therefore truth; something created by a writer with so much native talent, and the will & energy to bring solid working structure - if not quite traditional to bear. There are portraits of people (Any of the Rude family) and sketches of time periods (Brooklyn before "gentification" - the birth of rap, graffiti and tagging, punk rock in New York, and the crack epidemic - that are worth the price admission.

Nevertheless ... I totally get it. I can do without people peppering their reviews with F bombs in the name of some sort of credibility, but yeah. I can totally understand why someone who's not me would be annoyed this book. You don't have the same cultural mile-markers. You didn't have to clean dogshit off of some big kids shoe just because you were white. You didn't have a religious experience the first time you heard the new york dolls. I'm assuming you don't spend your youth on an unsupervised, drug spiral.

Honestly, it's tough for me to understand anyone else actually liking this book besides me. It's not for you.

This book is like the conversations I have with my wife.

It's almost like we were together growing up because we're the exactly the same age - we remember the same music, shows, cultural events - it's just that she was in Texas and I was in Seattle.

Same way with this thinly-veiled biographical novel. It's almost like Jonathan Lethem wrote this book to say "This is what it would have been like growing up in Brooklyn, Max."

Though exaggerated, the parallels were numerous - in particular around race.

In the book, Dylan Edbus is the only white kid at his pre-gentrified Brooklyn school.
I wasn't the only white kid at Montlake Elementary, or at Madrona, or at Meany, but my class was the first to be bussed to a black neighborhood. It was awkward and sometimes violent.

To make things more conflicted, his best friend, Mingus Rude, is the son of a black, down-on-his-luck, freebasing musician and a white woman.
My best friend in elementary school was my 1/2 black cousin Morgan.

Our feelings around race are mixed, with getting bullied for being white but at the same time, this is a huge part of our identity, Dylan's through the music and graffiti culture, mine through basketball.

My relationship with race complicated - very much like the portrait in the book. I still have some internal scars but it's also part of my identity and I'm proud of where I came from and I'm grateful for what I believe in is understanding of black America I have from growing up where I did. But I don't glamorize or idealize anything.


Dylan is precociously smart and escaped his public school neighborhood to feel very out of place at an academic high school, Stuyvesant.

Instead of going to Garfield, I went to Seattle Prep where I was a National Merit Scholar, and felt very out of place amongst all the kids from the suburbs.

Drugs are a big part of the Dylan Edbus and Mingus Rude story. Drugs and alcohol were a big part of the Max and Morgan story. Morgan is dead now. I'm in recovery, so ... not dead.

There is a bit of comic book magic in the book which some of the reviewers find off-putting.
I find thematical correct and idk, why the heck not.

I was never into comic books. More into Narnia and the Lord of the Rings. But I'm still taking that damn ring to Mordor, like it or not.

Anyway. I know this doesn't seem much like a real review but I'll leave that to someone else who can write that better. Because I can write my own experience better.

I will say that Generation X, as a cultural blip, is fascinating for me to revisit, now that we're closing in on the end of the story and becoming more and more of a an endangered species. So many of my friends are gone now, victims of depression, self-abuse, drugs and alcohol. I wear my self-loathing with pride, distorted guitars, distressed type and all.

We had our moment. It was as beautiful clear and shining as a Tom Verlaine solo. And I'm glad for this portrait of what was going on in Brooklyn that answers the question - what would it have been like for me?

ps.
And as for the reviews that talk about how there are no responsible adults in this book, and it can't be a coming-of-age book because no one grows up ... sorry kiddo we don't measure up. Guess you had to be there.