The Fortress of Solitude (novel)

Did You Know?

• A musical adaptation conceived by Daniel Aukin with music and lyrics by Michael Friedman and book by Itamar Moses was produced by New York Stage and Film and Vassar College's Powerhouse Theatre in summer 2012.
• The musical received an Off-Broadway production by New York Public Works in 2015.
• The world premiere of the stage version was on March 13, 2014, at the Dallas Theater Center.

Plot

Dylan Ebdus grows up in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, with his father Abraham, an experimental filmmaker, and his mother Rachel, who abandons the family when Dylan is young, sending only cryptic postcards. Dylan spends his childhood playing street games, often bullied by Robert Woolfolk, who steals his bike. His closest friend is Mingus Rude, the mixed-race son of former soul singer Barrett Rude Jr. The two boys, along with Arthur Lomb, share a love of comic books. Dylan and Mingus encounter a homeless man, Aaron X. Doily, and believe his ring is magical. They use it to fly, place graffiti, and act as vigilantes under the name 'Aeroman', a moniker Dylan creates but Mingus uses more adeptly. As they age, Barrett Rude Jr. develops a cocaine habit, and his father Senior moves in. After Mingus's eighteenth birthday, a heated argument leads Dylan to witness Mingus killing Senior. Mingus is imprisoned for manslaughter. Dylan attends Camden College in Vermont, feeling out of place, and invites Arthur Lomb to stay for a week; they deal drugs on campus until Dylan is forced to leave. Later, Dylan becomes a music critic and pitches film ideas in Hollywood. His girlfriend Abby dumps him. He returns to a gentrified Boerum Hill, learns from his father that Mingus donated an organ to Barrett Rude Jr., and visits Mingus in prison. Dylan offers the ring and money, but Mingus tells him to give it all to Robert Woolfolk, who is also incarcerated.

Characters

Dylan Ebdus is the son of Rachel and Abraham, an artist father and a Brooklyn native mother. He struggles to adjust to his neighborhood until meeting Mingus Rude, but they grow apart. Dylan attends Camden College in Vermont while Mingus goes to prison in Brooklyn, and Dylan later tries to rescue their friendship. Abraham Ebdus, Dylan's father, is an avant-garde artist who becomes more introverted after Rachel abandons the family, shutting himself in the attic to paint cels for an unfinished animated film. He supports himself and Dylan by painting science fiction book covers, a field in which he becomes prominent, though his relationship with Dylan is strained. Barrett Rude Jr. is the former lead singer of the 1960s soul group The Subtle Distinctions, who had several hits later sampled by current artists. He is Mingus's father and a musical icon for Dylan, but struggles with cocaine addiction. Arthur Lomb is Dylan's only white friend during elementary and middle school. He persuades Dylan to apply to Stuyvesant high school; Dylan is accepted but Arthur is not. They take different paths: Dylan goes to college and California, while Arthur stays in Brooklyn, becoming Mingus's right-hand man in drug deals and graffiti. By the novel's end, Arthur is a landlord and has opened a chic bistro, contributing to gentrification. Robert Woolfolk, nicknamed 'Willfuck', is Dylan's arch enemy who trashes his first bike, yokes him repeatedly, and holds him at gunpoint during a drug robbery. He ends up in prison with Mingus, and when Dylan visits, Mingus persuades Dylan to offer the ring to Robert to help him escape, but Robert's flight attempt ends in his death. Mingus Rude is the son of Barrett Rude Jr. and Dylan's childhood friend. He moves to Dean Street after Dylan, and their friendship evolves over the first part of the novel.

Literary style

The novel's two main parts are written as a third-person narrative in part one ('Underberg') and a first-person narrative in part three ('Prisonaires'), with distinctive dialogue. Toward the end, dialogue-intensive scenes and a brief section of 'Liner Notes' (part two) by Dylan are introduced to mirror his alienation. The style progresses through thirty-four chapters, with language complexity gradually increasing as Dylan ages. Throughout, slang and music indirectly portray the protagonist's state of mind and the subjective impact of events, capturing subjective experience through music rather than presenting actual experience through prose narrative.