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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
"I've been really rewarded for what a lot of people in the past have been punished for," Lethem said in a recent interview, "which is refusing to repeat myself ... I think my growth since my first published story [in 1989] is much, much larger than my growth previous to it." On the second page of "Fortress of Solitude," Dylan Ebdus will accidentally kill a kitten, one of "five, six, seven" in a litter that "squirmed ... among the rubble and fresh-planted vines and the musky ailanthus sheddings" of his Brooklyn backyard, not yet "gentrified" from lowly Gowanus into upscale Boerum Hill, but already changing from an authentic, coherent, real-life neighborhood into a remodeled world of chocolate lattes and yuppie restaurants, with names like "Breuklyn," "Berlin" and "The Gowanus Tart Works." Dylan's parents are among the first white folks to arrive, as Lethem's were in the early 1970s.
"Dylan was too young to understand what he'd done, except he wasn't," Lethem writes about the murdered kitten; his parents "hoped he'd forget, except he didn't." It's hard for Dylan to recall, nevertheless, in this and other cases, "whether he'd been there and watched it himself or only heard every detail, burnished into legend." Either way, he's afflicted with guilt, not just about the kitten, but about his own white status, his "middle class," his intrusion on what he knows, deep down, is not really his world. Dylan's father is an angry, lonely, bohemian painter who spends most of his time in his studio -- his fortress of solitude -- working on a hand-painted film that will never be finished, "painting at his tiny lightbox, making his incomprehensible progress." His mother is the exact opposite, a gregarious Brooklynite and incorrigible hippie, half-mad with desire, who will abandon her family, send Dylan to public schools to teach him what's what, and toss him straight out the door to play on the street with whatever dark children might happen along. Some are friendly, some hostile, and some dangerous, but most -- the lion's share -- are merely indifferent, like the city itself and its streets.
"Dylan didn't recall giving out his name," Lethem remarks at one point, "but everyone knew it and nobody cared what it meant. They might bother sometimes to mention that he looked like a girl but it wasn't apparently his fault. He couldn't throw or catch but that was just too bad. Not everyone could was the general drift." Early on, Dylan discovers that there are "two worlds" to navigate, inside and out, and knows "that he'd felt a yearning preference already then, that before the years of seasons, the years of hours to come on the street ... he'd wished for the Solver girls to sweep him away into an ecstasy of blondeness and matching outfits, tightened laces, their wheels barely touching the slate, or only marking it with arrows pointing elsewhere, jet trails of escape."
But the girls never did that; instead, they moved away and left Dylan alone, the only white child on Dean Street. Soon, he meets a new neighbor, Mingus Rude, four months older and light years beyond, half-black, half-white, the son of a one-time Motown singer fallen on luxury and cocaine days. Mingus becomes Dylan's best friend, mentor, protector, betrayer, lover and partner in crime and adventure. He's a former boy scout and future crack addict whom Dylan wants to "read like a language," to keep for himself, to emulate, imitate and eventually exculpate, when life, as it will, takes them down different roads. Together, Mingus and Dylan collect comic books, stolen from local bodegas. They play ball, go to school, jerk off and "tag" the walls and trains of New York with Mingus' distinctive signature, "Dose" -- graffiti art of a time and place now lost to all but the camera and the mind, memory's silent shore. Add to this a "flying man" with delirium tremens and a magic ring that bestows superpowers on those who wear it -- the power of flight, the gift of invisibility -- and, along with Mingus' plain brown corduroys, "anything was possible, really."
"If," says Lethem. "If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan's pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, the summer wouldn't give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours."
"The Fortress of Solitude" knows no literal, actual time, even though the first part, called "Underberg," ranges more or less chronologically over Dylan Ebdus's childhood, from his mother's disappearance and his father's awkward efforts to make up for her absence to the "yoking" and bullying Dylan endures on the street; his academic success; the arrival of Mingus Rude's shiftless, bible-thumping grandfather; a languid summer in Vermont; the rise of disco, punk, rap, crack, and the cataclysmic turn of events that puts an end to childhood for Dylan and Mingus both. The book is a Bildungsroman in the exact sense, the story of Dylan's self-development in the context of place and time. It's also a comedy, a history and a fantasy, where the strange and supernatural mix freely with the solid and austere, as they do in life, in memory, in everyone's autobiography.
"Second grade was first grade with math," Lethem explains: "Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered. You'd pushed futility at Public School 38 so long by then you expected the building itself would be embarrassed and quit."
Or this: "It was entirely possible that one song could destroy your life. Yes, musical doom could fall on a lone human form and crush it like a bug. That song, that song, was sent from somewhere else to find you, to pick the scab of your whole existence. The song was your personal shitty fate, manifest as a throb of pop floating out of radios everywhere."
And this, above all: "Dylan Ebdus's friendship with Mingus Rude lived in brief windows of time, punctuation to the unspoken sentences of their days ... By the time Dylan saw Mingus again what had happened in between was too much to explain, for either of them. For Dylan sensed that Mingus had his own secret burden, his own changed world beating away under the silence. There was nothing to do but pick up where they'd left off, pool what they still had in common." All around are the towers of solitude, some real and some self-imposed -- the Brooklyn House of Detention, the distant towers of the Manhattan skyline, Dean Street's one "abandoned house" and the emotional void of Dylan's grown-up years. When the narrative shifts, midway through, from Lethem's voice to Dylan's, it comes as a violent shock. But that's adulthood, after all, when the mixed and melted images of youth get stuck in the fixations of a fully formed personality. Only by going back and undoing -- re-creating -- can Dylan be set free, and, even then, you don't know to what.
"We were in a middle space then," Lethem concludes, writing of Dylan and his father, but perhaps of Dylan, himself and us all, "in a cone of white ... moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream." Look inside the bottle, as Lethem does, and you'll see that they're all alive, not frozen, but moving, just waiting to be brought back to size.
