Jonathan Lethem

Most of Jonathan Lethem’s early writing career consisted of science fiction novels that leaned toward the Philip K. Dick side of the genre—experimental, unorthodox and pounding on the door of literary respectability. When he finally got that door open, though, it was with a postmodern take on a different genre, Motherless Brooklyn, a detective noir full of sadness and ruin, narrated by a Tourette’s-plagued loner struggling to make sense of his world. Lethem stays in that New York borough for Fortress of Solitude, a semiautobiographical novel about two boys growing up in the 1970s, one a nerdy white kid, the other the black son of an embittered, alcoholic soul singer. It’s a sprawling story—at 500 pages, longer than any of his previous books, encompassing race, friendship, comic books and graffiti artists, childhood alienation and the slow gentrification of Lethem’s boyhood neighborhood, rendered a nearly foreign land in just a couple of decades.
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