fortress of suckitude

so. i didn't really like this book.

well, i really liked the first half. it was kind of meandering and unfocused, but i felt it was good overall. however, the second half kind of just killed it for me. actually, i think the final 50 or so pages kind of ruined it for me.

this book is pretty unlike most of lethem's other stuff. his work tends towards the surreal, post-modern genre mashup like kabo abe or george saunders. this one felt more like a memoir he'd been working up to writing for way too long. and to me, it feels like he gets too involved with the telling of the story and loses himself in details that feel unnecessary at times.

the characters are definitely interesting, but the way the story breaks down at the end feels incomplete to me. it sort of trails off and feels unfinished, like there is something more that needs to be said. maybe i was hoping for a reunion with his mother or i wanted to see mingus and dylan reunited, but it just felt like the story sprialed out of control and kind of gets muddled in its own intentions.

i read it all, though, so i guess it wasn't so terrible, but this isn't something i'll likely revisit again in the future.

I just this minute finished Fortress of Solitude. I liked the second half of the book much better than the first.

I agree with Peter, the first part of the book does feel really familiar. It was interesting, but also awful. I really dislike the micro-examination of a person's own self. I think it's tremendously boring and usually unimportant. I'm not saying that a person isn't allowed to reflect (an unexamined life is supposedly not worth living, after all), but a novel-length meditation on stoopball, graffiti, and comic book characters isn't my idea of profound. Everybody had a childhood. Every adult has little talismans from that childhood. I really don't get the relentless need to explore that stuff. Maybe I just had a super boring childhood, but it to me it seems like on some level that kind of writing is the same thing as I Love the 80s.

But the prose itself I liked. Lethem did a really good job of putting you right inside his protagonist, I thought. You definitely feel like you know him, although the half dozen or so members of the supporting cast in this book weren't really fleshed out, and seemed like they served mostly to illuminate Dylan's personality. We got a pretty thorough back story for Barry in those liner notes, but that was about it. What was Robert like when he wasn't yoking someone? How did Arthur and his mom interact after he turned crazy? I especially would have liked to know more about Abraham, because I thought he, as the silent, looming hermit upstairs, was one of the most interesting characters in the book.

So yeah. I liked how he wrote, just not really what he wrote about. Overall though, the book was enjoyable and I would probably read another by the same author.

Fortress of Togetherness

This book was a bit of a paradox to me because I tore through it, but ended up feeling generally unimpressed for reasons I can’t really identify. One of the things I found mildly irritating was that in one form or another, I feel like the first part of this book seemed really familiar – nerdy white/Jewish reminisces about growing up in a NYC borough, gets picked on and into trouble with juvenile criminal types, but perseveres and as an adult feels an attachment to his old block and its former tenants. It at least reminded me of the book/film Sleepers, about an Irish kid growing up in Hell’s Kitchen – you throw in some superhero shenanigans and send the main character to jail with his friends, and you’ve got a very similar story. That being said, I thought Lethem developed some very interesting characters – characters that are well aware of their flaws, yet carrying on despite being fully aware of the negative consequences of their actions (for example, Abraham’s full devotion to his film, at the expense of his deteriorating family, income, and artistic prestige, and both Dylan and Mingus’s loyalty to their fuck-up friends Robert and Arthur).

This is something I’ll leave to you more insightful literary types, but on the back of the book, our friend Michael Chabon praises Lethem for creating Dylan, “a genuine literary hero”. I exaggerate for the sake of argument, but is it a bit cynical to question why we should bestow this title on a dude whose life accomplishments consist of: Cocaine dealer, college dropout, accessory to prison escape, and writer of liner notes for obscure compilation albums? Generally, his “heroic” deeds seem to be limited to helping out his friends, maintaining a relationship with Mingus, and (mostly unsuccessfully) attempts to stop relatively innocuous crimes from occurring. Or am I confusing a literary hero with an extreme alpha-male hero that shoots down helicopters and deactivates apocalyptic nuclear warheads at the last second, saving humanity? Or maybe that’s precisely a statement of this book – that Superman/save the world types really only exist in comic books, and real heroes may be really flawed, but at least have the balls to try to make a difference where no-one else gives a shit (i.e. saving homeless alcoholics and incarcerated crack-dealers)? Something to think about, anyway…

P.S. I liked Yiddish Policeman's Union - good call, Chilibone.

listen well, sweetness

so for some reason, i held off on reading this book for a long time. lately picking up a book of any substance has been intimidating to me. i think the stress of work and real life make me want to escape into the mindlessness of video games or light comedy like terry pratchett or john hodgman. however, once i started reading this book, i became pretty obsessed with it. i was sitting on park benches on the canal, reading on my lunch break. i would go to coffee shops to read it. i remembered how to just enjoy getting immersed in a great story and enjoying the mystery and living alongside the characters for a little while.

the entire book had such a strange sense of sadness to it. the feeling of existing during the reversion of the jewish land back to america was very powerful. imagine knowing that soon your entire world was going to become a mired mess of confusion and exile, but not really be able to do anything about it.

the little bits of magic and mythology sprinkled throughout the narrative really helped to draw me in as well. i love a good far-fetched fantasy story now and then, but this garcia marquez level of magical realism is pretty much the perfect amount for me. the whole idea of the messiah as a gay junkie is appealing to me, not in a mean-spirited way. i think it is appealing to humanize religion and to temper the divine against the human in a story like this. landsman was always regretting not getting to know shpilman before he died, and i think that feeling was passed on to the reader as well.

after i read this book, i picked up another chabon novel "gentlemen of the road." it's short and easy and great.