Word: mingus
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...novel, which Lethem read passages from during his Cambridge stop, tells the story of Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude, a white boy and a black boy living in 1970s Brooklyn. Dylan, whose name comes from his parents’ fascination with the folk-singer, is conscious of race early on, especially when his mother proudly proclaims his status as one of only three white kids in his entire school. In an era of heightened race consciousness, Dylan is an experiment in immersion; fortunately, Lethem avoids heavyhandedness by leaving this theme of race consciousness understated...
Dylan, walking the precarious tightrope of race consciousness every day of elementary and middle school, encounters the rigors of a different kind of New York when he enters Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School. The friends he meets there are nothing like Mingus, from whom Dylan is gradually growing apart; instead, the Stuyvesant students are dorky, and Lethem seems to revel in their language and attitudes. Stuyvesant is many things to many characters, but, as Lethem writes, “crucially it was nerd nerd nerd nerd nerd...
Indeed, one of the book’s most interesting devices comes from a comic book: a flying man, who Dylan and Mingus glimpse repeatedly around their neighborhood. “In this book there’s a flying man,” Lethem said, all seriousness. “Every now and then there’s this figure leaping over the rooftops...
...Fortress of Solitude (Doubleday; 511 pages) is smart, scrawny, sensitive Dylan Ebdus. He's 5 when his parents move to a hard-luck black and Puerto Rican neighborhood in Brooklyn. His mom is a hippie, his dad a painter who spends his days on an incomprehensible, unfinishable masterpiece. Soon Mingus Rude moves in down the block. His father Barrett is a once famous soul singer--he fronted the fictional Subtle Distinctions--now in drastic, drug-addicted decline (Barrett owes more than a little to Marvin Gaye). The boys become friends--Mingus the leader, Dylan the follower--and Lethem spends much...
...Fantastic Four, graffiti tags, Car Wash, Star Wars--that we get the big picture too, the story of the 1970s told as a painful national adolescence. Soul begets funk begets rap. Cigarettes lead to weed, which gives way to cocaine, which leads to crack. As they get older, Mingus grows harder and quieter, Dylan nerdier but more confident. Yet a slender but tough strand still connects the boys, and they fight against all the usual suspects--racism, violence, their parents' failing marriages--to keep it. In the novel's second half, really an extended epilogue, Lethem follows his principals into...