The New Canon is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on great works of fiction published since 1985. These books represent the finest literature of the current era, and are gaining recognition as the new classics of our time. In this installment of The New Canon, Gioia looks at The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem.
More than any other writer of his generation, Jonathan Lethem has delighted in mixing up highbrow and lowbrow styles. Pulp fiction recipes and high literary aspirations somehow peacefully coexist with each other in his works, and the most puerile fantasies are elevated into ‘serious' art, yet without losing any of their playfulness.
In Motherless Brooklyn (1999), he took the formulas of a Raymond Chandler potboiler, and transformed them into a colorful, quirky novel about an amateurish investigator with Tourette syndrome trying to solve the mystery behind the murder of his mentor. In Amnesia Moon, from 1995, Lethem seemed to be channeling Philip K. Dick, while in his short story collection Men and Cartoons (2004) he somehow managed to create a variant of magical realism — imagine a Gabriel Garcia Marquez who grew up in Brooklyn reading about superheroes — by mixing stark confessional literature with the trappings of comic books. As far back as his debut novel, Gun, with Occasional Music (1994), Lethem was practicing this pot-luck with various genres, combining mystery, sci-fi, and elements of film and literary traditions into a amalgam that proved as strange as it was pleasing.
But Lethem’s masterpiece is The Fortress of Solitude, a semi-autobiographical novel of epic scope which follows the emotionally charged relationship of two friends, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude, over the course of three decades. As always, Lethem adds a dose of the fantastic –- the two friends share a magical ring that was handed on by a scraggly wino superhero –- yet the overall mood of the novel is soberly realistic and intensely introspective. Here Lethem rises above the playfulness that characterized his earlier books, and creates a powerful narrative with compelling characters who don’t need a cape and super powers to grab our attention.
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