The Fortress of Solitude Review

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The Fortress of Solitude ReviewFor the past couple of years, when my fiancé has been asked his opinion about a book, he's often been replying, "It was really good -- but not as good as Fortress of Solitude." (Books he's said this about: Kavalier and Clay, Everything is Illuminated, and Motherless Brooklyn, for example.) So I finally got around to reading it, and I have a feeling I'm going to be saying the same thing for quite some time. I absolutely loved this book; as soon as I finished the last page (breathless and in tears), I wanted to flip back to page one and start again, just so I could keep living in the world I'd been sharing with Lethem's characters for the last few weeks. (And I would have, but my fiancé's got first dibs on re-reading.)
A number of reviewers have complained that this book is slow, and I don't disagree. Fortress of Solitude is absolutely not a plot-driven book -- you won't be desperately flipping the pages to follow the characters through their adventures, skimming ahead to find out who lives or dies or what the next twist will be -- at least not often. The only other Lethem I've read is Motherless Brooklyn, which was essentially a murder mystery, so the two books differ greatly in their pacing and structure. If you loved Motherless Brooklyn, as I did, you may be surprised by how different the two books are. But the slow, descriptive, poetic quality of Fortress of Solitude was, in my view, its greatest strength.
Dylan Ebdus is the main character of this book, but its real subject, I think, is not so much Dylan as it is Brooklyn. This is a book about childhood and the process of growing up, and about a country and a neighborhood changing over the course of 30 years, more than it is a book about particular events in its characters' lives. And that description could make it sound like this is an abstract book -- but like the best art, it achieves universality only through the closely observed particularity of its subject. Because, on the page, it is just this: an artful description of particular events in its characters' lives. After finishing it, more than with any book I've read for quite some time, I feel as though the events of the book are my own memories and the characters people that I've known. So maybe that's why I say it is a book about childhood, growing up, the world changing: because those are the universal themes in it that made its particular moments so relatable.
I've been trying to think of a book to compare Fortress of Solitude to, but it's different than the fiction I usually read and love. There are aspects of the book that remind me of some of the Faulkner I've read; particularly Light in August. The settings and characters of Faulkner's work are quite different, but both books derive their beauty from close observations of a collection of moments in their characters' lives, moments that don't always directly lead from one to another, but rather gather together into a document of memories and images. The pleasure of reading Fortress of Solitude comes mostly from the almost cinematic experience of envisioning its sensual descriptions of a life. If you're finding it slow going, I'd suggest just giving it some time; it's a hard book to get into in 15-minute increments. I found it beautifully written but not particularly compelling at the beginning; I think I put it down for about a week before starting up again. But for me, it was well worth the effort to get into; by the end, I couldn't put it down, and I've been talking about it ever since.The Fortress of Solitude Overview

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