I just finished reading "Fortress of Solitude" by Johnathan Lethem.
I read this author's previous book "Motherless Brooklyn" about 5 years ago, and I was not overly impressed. "Fortress" has won several national book awards and received very good reviews when it came out.
The story is about a white kid growing up in early 70's Brooklyn, at the early stages of the gentrification of the city's brownstone neighborhoods. The boy, Dylan, suffers with being the only white kid around, a distant artistic father and a mother who abandons them both when he is about 10. Dylan is at the mercy of tough black kids and develops his own persona through friendships with a black neighbor and another white kid who shows up later.
The story takes a turn into magical realism, which greatly affects the plot towards the end of the book. The second half of the book jumps several years into the future, after Dylan has moved to Berkeley and become a freelance music journalist. Dylan is still coming to grips with his past, and the mystery of his mother's abandonment by the end of the book.
Ultimately I found this book to be unsatisfying. Although Lethem is a very good writer, the real point (or plot?) of the book escaped me. The story entertained and saddened alternately, but I could not ever comprehend the significance of Aeroman or the nature of the internal conflict Dylan was struggling with.
Maybe it was just too deep for me...
