Jonathan Lethem

JONATHAN LETHEM

His early novels featured talking gangster rabbits, robot televangelists, time-warping black holes and cowboys on a distant planet. Although Jonathan Lethem has since drifted away from outright sci-fi subjects, there's still an alien landscape within The Fortress of Solitude: 1970s Brooklyn. Like its predecessor, Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress is a semi-autobiographical work set in the Boerum Hill neighborhood where Lethem grew up--an enclave transformed beyond recognition today. "It was a very fitful place when I was young . . . a meeting ground for a lot of different . . . cultures, and now it's pretty uniformly white."

Back in gentrified Boerum Hill as an adult, Lethem "can't help but have this double vision and see the past everywhere," he told The New Yorker. Such memories included "getting yoked," or bullied for money, as one of the only Caucasian boys at school, losing his mother to cancer at age 14 and finding catharsis in soul music. Lethem reshapes these elements and much more in Fortress, which contemplates coming-of-age in an unusual, sometimes tragic multi-cultural milieu. Protagonist Dylan Edbus is the lonely son of bohemian artists and the only white boy on Dean Street in Brooklyn; an easy target for bullies, he eventually finds an ally in Mingus, a similarly neglected black boy. Fortress follows the pair as they endure urban life together via superheroes, graffiti, the burgeoning of hip-hop, and a device that would make Tolkien proud: a magical ring that grants its wearer the gift of flight.

This thread of magical realism is more than a nod to Lethem's fantastical beginnings, he told Newsday. "Wanting to sing like Al Green when you can't sing at all . . . to be black when you're white . . . to take care of your parents when you're only a child . . . these things are like wanting to fly or be invisible. Without them, the book would risk being circumscribed into sociology." However it's categorized, Fortress has been hailed as "this generation's Catcher in the Rye and Dylan Edbus its Holden Caufield" (Rocky Mountain News).

"When I was starting out, I had a tremendous interest in form and in concept," the author told AP about the years before Motherless Brooklyn, which won the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. "Eventually, I was able to use what I learned . . . and bring in more personal material." To create Fortress he also drew inspiration from Philip Roth, James Baldwin and Charles Dickens.

One of three children, he was born in New York in 1964, the son of Judith, a political activist, and Richard, a painter; though half-Jewish, he was raised as a Quaker in Brooklyn.

Young Lethem read everything, including Asimov, Dostoyevsky, Kerouac, Chandler and Kafka, but initially intended to follow his father's career in the visual arts (his sister is a photographer and his brother a graffiti artist). Yet he changed his focus to fiction as a student at Bennington College in Vermont, which he attended off and on for several years, spending time in the San Francisco Bay area in between. Before he published his first short story (in 1989) and novel (in 1994), Lethem managed to avoid office work entirely, finding employment at bookstores on both coasts for over 15 years.