Nick Parker
This Superhero Life
American writer Jonathan Lethem came to critical attention last year with the publication of The Fortress of Solitude. It was an ambitious coming-of-age novel set in his own childhood stomping-ground of Brooklyn, New York, and following the lives of Dylan Edbus, his friend Mingus Rude, and the other residents of their neighbourhood through the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, as their lives become intertwined with, amongst other things, graffiti art, comic books, drugs, hip-hop, bullying, racial tension, and a ring that gives them magical superpowers. It was a maddeningly uneven book – daring, evocative and poignant, but also meandering, and afflicted with a grandness of tone which often left you frustratingly distanced from the clamour of Brooklyn. Perhaps this was Lethem re-creating Dylan’s ‘fortress of solitude’ as he hustled through his hostile urban childhood. The sections in which the magic ring features also sat uneasily in what was otherwise a meticulously realist narrative.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'His books ... seemed to anticipate the America that was throbbing all around me, with its violence and disappointments, its spiritual emptiness, its foolishness and its freaks.'
@PaulTheroux_ on the lure of Nathanael West.
http://ow.ly/WV2p50xrqOr
Stuck for a Christmas present this year? Give someone a Literary Review gift subscription!
Use the code 'GOODCHEER19', and you'll pay just £35 for a full year's subscription. We'll also throw in a handsome LR tote bag.
http://ow.ly/vC6p50xrtIo
https://literaryreview.co.uk/svetlana-prokopyeva-yuri-dmitriev