Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Tuesday, July 19, 2005 The Pitch: It's like The Blob meets The Thing! I finished Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude yesterday, then suspiciously re-read the blurbs on the back of the book. How could a book write so well about Marvel Comics (specifically Omega The Unknown), Brian Eno's Another Green World, New York in the '70s, Hoagy Carmichael, Berkeley, CA, science fiction conventions, prison, bullies, grafitti and hip-hop, and also feature a cameo from Stan Brakhage, and still be bad? One of the reviewers referred to Fortress of Solitude as the best book of the year, and I can almost see it: FoS may be the best bad book of the year, or maybe the worst good book of the year, or, or--something.I haven't read much by or about Lethem but what I have presents Lethem as a guy from Brooklyn who grew up there in the late '70s and early '80s and whose mother died when he was young: compare and contrast this with Fortress of Solitude, about a guy from Brooklyn who grew up there in the late '70s and early '80s and whose mother ran off when he was young, and you might think that FoS would be Lethem's most autobiographical novel. I am also inclined to think so because the book is such a mess: it's in two parts, the first told in third person, the second in first person. It's presented on front cover and back, inside and out, as the story of two boys. (It's right there on the front of the Fortress of Solitude's home page: "This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude.") The protagonist, Dylan, is white and friends with Mingus, who is black, and although Mingus is introduced early, and well, he is rarely used throughout the book, he barely exists. Again and again, we return to Dylan who for the first part of the book barely speaks, barely thinks, is passive and reactive and grows up under the yoke of bullies by being as silent and still as possible. We are told how close he is to Mingus and shown it, but we never see how it develops from the first time they meet. It just is. Dylan just is. Brooklyn just is. And everything that happens, happens. On the one hand, this is pretty laudable: Lethem takes a novel about growing up, about friendship, even throws in a magic ring, and then mercilessly buffs away anything that might resemble sentiment. To grow up young and white and scared in pre-gentrified Brooklyn is the book's subject, and it captures that subject with a lacerating clarity, but despite every blurb on the back, every promise made by the appearance of another enticingly drawn character, it is incapable of escaping that subject. The book feels less like a novel and more like psychic surgery--Lethem seems to be using the theater of fiction in which to dissect himself and to clinically share the results with his audience. As surgical demonstration, it's impressive. But for those of us who came to a book expecting the joys of fiction, it's frustrating. Lethem creates a dozen richly fascinating characters and barely lets us see any of them, returning again and again to his doppelganger, picking at him as if he were a scab. Maybe Lethem is trying to tell us that although we are the central character of our own life, we are probably the least interesting. Perhaps Lethem is telling us that stories are possibilities, and most of us don't bother to take those possibilities, are to busy stinging under the weight of the yoke to do anything else. Could be that Lethem is trying to present a real life, both in its dreams and in its reality, and the dreams, being dreams, are as real to us as our reality, but they exist separate from us and we can only watch them passively play out. But, to me? It's more likely that this book was a substantially painful and messy birth, psychically incapicitating, and the author spun through thousands and thousands of pages, then had to cut it all down to everything that couldn't be let go. He took every ending that smelled false, every conclusion that threatened to offer the comfort of story to the reader (that perhaps in an earlier draft comforted the writer as he worked harder and harder to unseat the cold truth of his self that had held him in thrall for so long) and left only the unpatchable, impressive blob that remained; passive protagonist, disappearing characters, endlessly unhelpful digressions, and all. With the exception of Infinite Jest, I think I've never been as impressed with a book that left me so frustrated (or vice-versa). If you only read twelve books a year, I don't recommend it and yet I still want to urge people to read it, as if the book will be more fully grown and better developed by the time you encounter it. That's the kind of book Fortress of Solitude is. posted by Jeff Lester | 8:44 AM | |
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