Motherless Writing

Finally finished reading Jonathan Lethem´s sprawling Brooklyn bildungsroman last night. I can now return to my life, which I had taken a break from in order to delve obssessively into this book. The goddamned novel had me missing class because I was staying up till 5am reading it, and it´s a wonder I didn´t brake a leg as I walked down subway platforms without putting the book down. Lethem is quite the wordsmith, a word-fucker in fact. His novel before this one, "Motherless Brooklyn", starred an orphaned, tourettic private detective who couldn't stop spitting out freely associated words and phrases. Fortress of Solitude is just that without the Tourrett's: verb-o-rrhea (of the finest quality) just for the sheer fun of it, like catching a spaldeen in mid-flight, which is precisely what its young, white protagonist likes to do in his all-black block.

The novel is certainly uneven, I'm not sure about its supernatural aspects tagged on top of such a clearly autobiographical conceit. For some reason Americans, and Anglos in general, never seem to get Magical Realism quite right. Still Lethem manages to pull off some fine tricks. The novel is composed of sequences, with elliptical jumps of varying degrees in between. The novelist launches into these without giving any expository information, in media res-style. It has a disorienting effect where characters, situations and plot emerge a piece at a time and come together a page and a half after the sequence has begun. The reader is left to pull it all together, forced to make sense of the Brooklynite mid-seventies, much like Dylan Ebdus -the main character- is trying to do.

Not least in the bag of tricks is a white writer giving race relations such a genuine gaze. White guilt, black oppression, ghetto mentality, alternating victim/victimizer attitudes: all of these fuse to create the muddle that was the gaffitied, funkified, proto-gentrified, hippie communed world where the action takes place. And then there is the loneliness and the yearning, two irresistible Lethem staples. Candid and crushing in his portrayal of motherlessness, Lethem might easily fall prey to his defensive hipsterism, but he is always moving.