Late To The Party: The Fortress of Solitude
One of my many bad habits is the avoidance of certain cultural offerings when they first appear, owing to a desire not to be part of whatever mass rush there is. For example, I just recently began watching The Sopranos, only to discover that--duh!--it's damn good television. Call it a need to swim against the tide or passively resist media cheerleading, it often means that I miss out on some very fine books/movies/tv shows/music, not to mention the fact that it diminishes my stockpile of cocktail party chatter.
In keeping with this tradition, I only recently read Jonathan Lethem's seismically wonderful The Fortress of Solitude. Certainly plenty of words have been spilled in praise of this book, making anything I could so a belated rehash. But I strongly urge anybody with an interest in the following to read the book:
-New York City in the 1970s
-Superhero worship
-Relationships between fathers and sons
-The rise of hip hop
-The first generation of graffiti tagging
-Brooklynology
-Pop music fanaticism
-The trials of childhood
-Prison culture
-Magnet high schools in New York City
-The dawn of the punk movement
-Teenage rebellion
-Summer camp
And of course, the writing, line for line, word by word, is exceptional; it's the kind of book you read with a pen in hand so you can mark off certain passages.
