When a Neighborhood Changes
HUGHES, EVAN
When a Neighborhood Changes The Fortress of Solitude By Jonathan Lethem Doubleday. 470 pp. $26.00. Reviewed by Evan Hughes Editorial assistant, "New York Review of Books" Manhattan is one...
...Dylan and Heather are old enough to be aware of their regional and class differences, but not yet jaded enough to let them get in the way: "He felt her curiosity as a kind of enclosing radiance, a field...
...To cite just one emblematic episode, in the summer of '77 14-year-old Dylan gets shipped to Vermont courtesy of the Fresh Air Fund...
...The World Trade Center has recently cast its shadow across the East River, but the buddies are too busy marking out their territory on the block to notice...
...There he and the daughter of his host family take a shine to each other...
...Among other endearing tendencies, he imparts to his charges various quintessentially Brooklyn sayings...
...Those who actually fuel the engine of the metropolis—restaurant workers, deliverymen, unheralded artists—generally make their homes in the outer boroughs of New York City...
...Van Morrison, total f...ing depression...
...the drugs get harder...
...Like the author, I happen to live there...
...That is merely one of the consequences of gentrification, though, a process begun slowly some 30 years ago that is now running rampant...
...Nevertheless, I often wonder: Where are the struggling painters and washed-up musicians, where are the Dylans and Minguses...
...Dylan, named after Bob, is the son of a reclusive artist who devotes years on end to painting the individual frames of a very long reel of film, while designing paperback book jackets to pay the bills...
...I probably should not complain about the demographic changes...
...Throughout the rest of the book, too, the intimate and universal keep crossing paths...
...Guess what...
...Sure, he'd be sad, accept pity, work with whatever came his way...
...Frank yells and cajoles and is, after all, tied up in some serious wrongdoing, yet we cannot help liking him...
...As Dylan and Mingus grow older and get into trouble we become close to them even as we watch their eyes reflect the very warp and woof of history...
...Marvin Gaye, dead...
...One, Dylan Ebdus, is a lonely paleface...
...My father don't talk to that lying bitch no more," say's Mingus...
...Near the end of this sprawling social novel, the best I've read in years, Mingus comes back into the picture and we get a homecoming of sorts, a drive through Dean Street...
...Lethem's inventive 1999 page-turner, Motherless Brooklyn, also centers on boys without a major female presence in their lives...
...Try renting a one-bedroom apartment south of 11 Oth Street for less than $1,500 a month and the real estate brokers will shake their heads and chuckle...
...What follows is a first romance so piquantly described that it hurts...
...The scope and import of The Fortress of Solitude elevate it to another shelf entirely...
...Honored at a conference for his widely touted book cover art, he works himself into a lather about how much of a sellout he has become: "If you'd visit a museum even once, you'd know you're celebrating a second-rate thief...
...She subsequently writes Dylan cryptic, quasi-poetic postcards from spots hither and yon, signed only "running crab...
...His wife skips town early on, leaving these words for her child: "be wilder than they are, wear flames in your hair, that's my recommendation...
...Yeah, yeah," he often interrupts when one of them is spitting out an excuse, "tell your story walking...
...The novel's protagonists are two boys growing up on Dean Street, between Bond andNevins, in the '70s and '80s...
...Dylan's father, Abraham, is experiencing his own friction with the outside forces...
...But in recent times the white-collar crowd has been spreading rapidly into the blue-collar neighborhoods of Queens and particularly Brooklyn—where, for example, the Park Slope section has become a favorite of the khakis-and-strollers set...
...The beating heart of Lethem's book is a Brooklyn neighborhood that includes the Gowanus and Wyckoff housing projects—a few subway stops, and several worlds, away from lower Manhattan's financial district...
...Reviewed by Evan Hughes Editorial assistant, "New York Review of Books" Manhattan is one of the few major urban centers in the country where the upper classes not only still live, but predominate...
...Although Dylan is a fairly successful pop music journalist in Berkeley, he does not seem quite at home...
...These kids are not poor, and Lethem doesn't dwell on their exclusion from privilege...
...my block was named the "greenest" in Brooklyn last year, and I can walk without fear at any hour through a subway passage described by the narrator in a '70s-era scene as a "terrifying gauntlet...
...Without romanticizing the difficult lives of those displaced, Jonathan Lethem's new novel poignantly captures what is lost when a community is recast to attract those who spend their days in offices...
...That night, though, Dylan lies in bed "dreaming awake of the city on fire...
...Here crime, rank odors and rats flow freely, but the streets hum with life...
...Mingus' dad,awellmeaning yet ineffectual caretaker, is a drug-addled singer from a once famous doo-wop act who apparently paid off the white mother handsomely to get custody...
...the rents go up...
...Things have changed...
...Soon his black girlfriend leaves him because she can no longer take his obsession with his magical childhood...
...When they watch television coverage of the great New York blackout and subsequent chaos, he tries to play it all off as "no big deal...
...The major twist in this crime drama has nothing to do with the plot: The narrator has a particularly virulent form of Tourette's syndrome...
...The boys both decamp from the city, on very different terms...
...They are simply urban tykes whose days are shaped as much by ball-playing and graffiti—later girls and drugs—as by their somewhat distant parents...
...He not only stutters and unleashes obscenities at random but also produces a near-constant barrage of verbal riffs on what he hears and sees around him...
...These are the sort of people that are being driven out of Boerum Hill with all deliberate speed...
...In the 1960s, it was dubbed Boerum Hill when a resident sought to give it a touch of class by evoking its colonial past...
...Drawn by their lack of troublesome family ties, he takes the teenagers under his wing as operatives ("Minna Men...
...Lucinda Williams, give her Prozac...
...the other, Mingus Rude, is half black...
...The narrator and his companions meet while cooped up at a downtown orphanage...
...The wordplay is sometimes magnificent, jive poetry with a touch of the tragic...
...As she hilariously rants that his music collection reveals an adulthood being lived under a shadow, she smashes his CDs to the floor one at a time: "Johnny Adams, depression...
...The music modulates through disco, punk and funk to hip-hop...
...In a rollicking scene that borders on the excessive, Dylan pitches a Hollywood movie executive an idea for a film about a real-life music act consisting of five black men who came together in a Tennessee prison in the 1950s: "By force of will I was leveraging the Prisonaires' reality, their sweat andpain and love, into this pallid room, into Jared's pallid mind...
...They do find a father figure, though, in a highly memorable small-time mobster named Frank Minna...
...Flash forward to 1999...
...Like Bernard Malamud's The Tenants and Frank Conroy's Body & Soul (not to mention his classic memoir StopTime), The Fortress of Solitude provides a portrait both thrilling and sad of an area before its makeover...
Vol. 86 • July 2003 • No. 4
