Fortress of Solitude

I’ve been doing a fair number of reviews lately, so it actually comes as something of a shock to read something entirely for myself. So much so that it’s getting to the stage when I have a gap in the reading schedule I have great difficulty picking what I want to read next. Sometimes it’s almost a matter of choosing something at random. So it was when I pulled The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem (Faber, 2003) off the shelf. I’d been walking up and down the bookshelves completely failing to feel moved by anything waiting there, and I think it was probably on the third pass that I finally lighted on the Lethem. I enjoyed Motherless Brooklyn immensely (what is it with Lethem and solitariness?), but I remember the reviews of this book were rather sniffy, and I have to admit that the cover, a riot of grafitti, is not immediately attractive. Still, this was the book my fingers caught on as I ran them along the shelves.

In the end, I think the reviews were right, but that doesn’t make this a bad book. The first two thirds are absolutely brilliant – even better than Motherless Brooklyn – and if the book looses its way a bit in the final third, it still remains a powerful and impressive work.

Astonishing Stories

Let us assume, just for a moment, that ‘genre’ delineates a mode of story rather than a mode of telling, in other words that it refers to science fiction and romance and crime and the like rather than to prose and poetry and drama. With me so far? Let us, then, also imagine that there are two approaches to genre. For the sake of argument I shall call them the ‘resident’ and the ‘visitor’ approaches. Those of us who are ‘resident’ in a genre, its habituees, its authors and critics and devoted readers, want the genre to grow and live and change. Thus, although we delight in familiar landmarks, we also like exploring new neighbourhoods, new ways of doing the genre, because that is what keeps it fresh. Those who are visitors to the genre, however, here to see the sights, want it to stay the same because they are here only to see the familiar landmarks, indeed they define the genre in terms of those landmarks, they orient themselves on those landmarks (TM Maureen). Anything that does not conform to the pattern set by those landmarks is not noticed by the visitor because, by definition, it is not what drew them to the genre in the first place. The residents are happy to see change, the visitors are in search of the static.