I grow all weak-in-the-knees sentimental when novelists write about such icons of my childhood as spaldeens and stoopball.
Such delights abound in the first half of Jonathan Lethem's novel Fortress of Solitude. The novel's Boerem Hill (newly upscaled from Gowanus) in the 1970s was as rich in such street games as my Flatbush in the 1940s and 50s. Nevertheless, it' can't be said that these elements of nostalgia redeem Lethem's huge undisciplined sprawling novel. Fortress of Solitude is crazily inventive, profuse, uncontrolled. I have rarely read a novel by a respectable author so in need of a dictatorial editor. Surely, there's enough material here for four or five fine novels, each of which would deliver more bounce and impact than this door-stopper. If Fortress of Solitude were a building, it would be called overdecorated; if it were a piece of music or a film, it would be overproduced.
Some of my Flatbush cohort like to think that 1950s Brooklyn was a paradise for children. I am not of that opinion. To me, Brooklyn was frequently menacing when it wasn't just plain boring. The so-called "melting pot" was a cauldron a racial animosities. But it wasn't all bad -- there were the Dodgers and the camaraderie of the schoolyard. The public schools were crowded and disorderly, but there were great teachers and enthusiastic students. Not so in dystopian Fortress, a lord-of-the-flies world of vicious adolescents, incompetent adults, and dysfunctional government. Far worse than I remember; and worse, I think, than the reality.
The author of Motherless Brooklyn, a much finer novel, presents us this time with two motherless youngsters, one white and one black, who through thick and thin maintain a deep abiding friendship. But alas the novel veers into territory that some might call magic realism, but to me was neither realistic nor magical nor even remotely credible no matter how much disbelief I tried to suspend. To read the last embarrassing third of the novel was a sad chore.
I don't think that I have ever read a substantial and ambitious novel that paid so little attention to female characters. Where are the ladies of Boerum Hill? Not only are the mothers missing, but the occasional inadvertent woman who wanders unto the page remains an unrealized cipher, a nothing.
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