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Monday, Oct 6, 2008
Jonathan Lethem's astonishing "The Fortress of Solitude" places him in the first rank of American novelists.
Sep 12, 2003 | The title of Jonathan Lethem's amazing new novel refers to the "secret sanctum" of the Man of Steel -- Superman -- an impenetrable hideout, as students of Action Comics will know, hewn from the solid rock of a mountain "in the desolate Arctic wastes," where Superman goes to relax and unwind, "conducts incredible experiments, keeps strange trophies, and pursues astounding hobbies!" This fortress, as yet unnamed, made its first appearance in the Superman series around 1942, when creative ideas for Superman's future began to wear thin and new characters joined old plots to keep the enterprise going.
"Here I can keep the trophies and dangerous souvenirs I've collected from other worlds," Superman explained. "Here I can conduct secret experiments with my super-powers and keep souvenirs of my best friends!" The fortress became a gimmick, convenient, for the retelling of tales, a window on Superman's past adventures and a mirror of things to come. "I built it here in the polar wastes because the intense cold keeps away snoopers," Superman said. Its precise location was never disclosed, only that it lay "in a region of ice and snow" and that no one would ever read the diary Superman kept there, a "gigantic book, made of metal," which he wrote in Kryptonese with one of his fingernails, "while hovering in midair high off the Fortress floor."
Apart from its "fabulous trophy room, housing the hard-won memorabilia of more than a thousand adventures," Superman's icebound lair -- "the most glamorous hideaway in the entire universe!" -- contained a secret laboratory, where he labored in vain to discover an antidote to kryptonite. There was also a zoo -- an "interplanetary" zoo -- and an array of exhibits, weapons, robots and tools, along with chambers dedicated to Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Perry White and Superman's real and foster parents -- Lara and Jor-El, late of Planet Krypton, and the Kents, Jonathan and Martha, whose fortuitous truck-ride on the outskirts of Smallville allowed them to rescue the future Man of Steel, one sunny afternoon, from what might have been a fatal landing in a burning rocket "right out of the funny papers," as Jonathan Kent said.
It wasn't until 1949 that the Fortress of Solitude finally got a name; in 1962, Supergirl moved in, along with Superman's fiercest opponents -- Brainiac, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Lex Luthor, etc. -- who existed as figures in the "Hall of Enemies" and were kept in check by kryptonite detectors and "booby traps of an unspecified nature." The effect was to have everyone in the Superman saga present all at once, on demand, next to the miniature city of Kandor, once the capital of planet Krypton, now reduced to microscopic size and preserved inside a bottle, its buildings intact, its inhabitants alive, going about their business as if nothing had happened and hoping that Superman, one day, might restore them to their natural dimension.
Alas, this was the one thing Superman couldn't do, along with neutralizing kryptonite. From time to time, when it suited a plot, he managed to shrink himself down, hop in the bottle and pursue his adventures in the Kandor of old, but not for long, and not without risk. In fact, the past can never be recaptured, only re-created and experienced fresh. It's a lesson Superman might have learned if he hadn't known everything already, and it's the message, if there is one, of Jonathan Lethem's astonishing book -- "that to find one's art is to kill time dead with a single shot ... Maybe to perfect a thing," Lethem observes, "was to destroy it."
"Like a match struck in a darkened room," his novel begins: "Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o'clock on an evening in July." These are the Solver sisters, Thea and Ana, shining "like a new-struck flame" in the eyes of Dylan Ebdus, the currently five-year-old hero/narrator/recollected protagonist of Lethem's mighty "Fortress." The sisters are blond and beautiful, strangers, like Dylan, in a rundown New York neighborhood made up principally of browns and blacks. It's 1972 and the Solvers are "the new thing, spotlit to start the show ... The girls murmured rhymes," Dylan thinks, or "were murmured rhymes" -- it's hard to tell "in the orange-pink summer dusk, the air and light which hung over the street, over all of Gowanus like the palm of a hand or the inner surface of a seashell."
Gowanus is a part of Brooklyn, of course, not Krypton or Kandor, and Lethem is the new poet of Brooklyn -- the new Whitman, even, whose bold imagination and sheer love of words defy all forms and expectations and place him among this country's foremost novelists. Five years in the making, "The Fortress of Solitude" is Lethem's "spiritual autobiography," proudly claimed as such and following magically on the heels of 1999's award-winning "Motherless Brooklyn," the novel that introduced a detective with Tourette's syndrome to the United States and marked Lethem's departure from the hybrid but definitely marginal genres in which he'd previously worked -- mysteries, westerns and sci-fi's, sometimes all three at once. To say that Lethem bends the rules, pushes the envelope and extends the possibilities of fiction is to state only part of the case. He's defiant, delicious, in his refusal to be pinned.
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