the fortress of solitude: a report

[umberto rossi]

I have just finished reading Lethem's last novel. Somebody asked that 
I sent info about it to the list. Well, it's a big book. 512 pages is 
no joke. But Pynchonites are accustomed to heavyweight novels. I 
don't think one who has done the whole tour, including V., GR, and 
M&D can get scared by Proust or Musil or Tolstoy. So the NYC bard (Mr 
Lethem) should pose no threat with his five hundred something pages.

Did I like it?

Huh, difficult to say. It's such an ambitious book that once you 
finish it it's difficult to answer just by a monosyllable, be it yes 
or no. Let's say I'm glad to have read it. Having not read it would 
make me a poorer man.

It's a bildungsroman. Wha', this Avant-pop man, this Lethem guy, with 
is SF background, his De Lillant prose, his Kafka penchant, his 
surrealistic short stories, he wrote a bildungsroman? Yeah, he did. I 
quote the dictionary's definition of the cumbersome German term: "A 
novel whose principal subject is the moral, psychological, and 
intellectual development of a usually youthful main character"--and 
that's exactly what you'll find in The Fortress of Solitude. Plus the 
Seventies as never told before, the history of Crack, race relations 
in the US, meditations on the evolution of black music from soul to 
disco to rap, wonderful pages on prisionaires, a treaty on graffiti, 
and many other things. 

Uh, the ending gets quite close to Thomas Pynchon's Territory. 

umberto rossi
___________________

		"A mulatto
		An albino
		A mosquito
		My libido"