've just returned from a trip back to Brooklyn, only it wasn't my Brooklyn, oh, no, not at all the Brooklyn I remembered. The geography of that New
York borough may have been right—that is, the street and neighborhood names were all familiar—but the soul and sensibility were not those of my Brooklyn. It was akin to visiting in dream an apartment in which I grew up, the sort of fugue state in which I walk through rooms I never knew existed, and yet I'm not surprised one bit, somehow accepting it as true.
But that dissonance doesn't mean that either my recent tour guide or my past memories were wrong, for Brooklyn, as it turns out, is a diamond with as many facets as it has inhabitants. Each of us sees the place through a personal lens of distortion.
The reason I'm telling you about Brooklyn instead of Mars this month is because my tour guide was Jonathan Lethem, likely known to you primarily as the author of the eclectic science-fiction novel Gun, With Occasional Music, and the magic bus I rode on to Brooklyn was his newest novel, The Fortress of Solitude. Though marketed as a mainstream novel, with cover blurbs not from SF luminaries but from authors with a more general appeal, the book concerns two kids, one black, one white, growing up on the mean streets of Brooklyn, who come into possession of a ring they believe to be magical. And based on the evidence Lethem offers, the ring truly is magical.
Perceptions can say more about the perceiver than the perceived. For example, it turns out that Lethem and I grew up on opposite ends of the borough, so that we experienced different spectrums of childhood. The Brooklyn I was raised in didn't seem to have mean streets. My Brooklyn was a playground. My Brooklyn might as well have been The Wonder Years. I guess I was a hothouse flower and didn't know it. And so the book showed me that a sense of place is a very personal thing. Before reading the book, I had thought that if I'd told people I had grown up in Brooklyn, they would know what I meant. Now I'm not so sure.
But The Fortress of Solitude provides a lesson in more than just the meaning of two opposing perceptions of place. It also offers a vivid example of two perceptions of science fiction itself. It is a lens through which we can see how we are being perceived by others, a distorted mirror in which we are being asked to see our own faces. (Science fiction has misguided impressions of its own concerning novels on the other side of the literary fence, but we'd best leave that for a future editorial, or else we'll never get out of here.)
Love 'em and Lethem
Jonathan Lethem, one of us (after all, his early short stories were published in venues such as Aboriginal, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, Interzone, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and other genre periodicals), is seen by the publishing establishment as not one of us. His evolution means that he is no longer a science-fiction writer—instead, he is a serious writer. He is seen more as a Martin Amis or Michael Chabon than as a Joe Haldeman or Michael Swanwick. His novel Motherless Brooklyn won not the genre-centric Hugo or Nebula Award, but rather the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has been enveloped by literature's cloaking embrace. The last writer to make the successful leap from the pages of SF magazines to the laps of the literati was Kurt Vonnegut. For most, the ghetto walls have proven too high.
Mainstream critics have not known what to make of this, because in the publishing world, Neanderthals are not supposed to become Homo sapiens. This puts me in mind of the poetic descriptions for groupings of animals given by the zoological world. A "murder" of crows. An "exaltation" of larks. A "shrewdness" of apes. Based on the reactions of mainsteam reviewers to The Fortress of Solitude, I'm beginning to think that any time you put more than one of them together, they should be considered a "confusion" of critics (with apologies to our many learned Science Fiction Weekly writers, none of whom, of course, should be included in that category).
For Lethem's wonderful novel seemed to confuse some of them. The contrast between the gritty hyper-realism of New York street culture with the yearning for comic-book transcendence of its sometimes invisible, sometimes flying, occasionally costumed characters confounded many. "Look, make up your mind," they seemed to be demanding. "You can't have it both ways!"
And yet, if the novel had not come to them from an author bearing a traceable science-fiction pedigree, I'm betting they would have willingly accepted Lethem's inspired conflations. In fact, if a John Updike had offered it up to them, they might not have even judged the fantasy elements as literal, but instead understood them as the ramblings of an untrustworthy narrator. Or if the book had been penned by Gabriel García Márquez, and set in Colombia, perhaps they would have taken the mix at face value, and accepted the magical as an everyday part of life. For childhood is, after all, a magical place.
And yet reviewers outside of the genre often had trouble doing this. Logan Browning, in the Houston Chronicle, had this to say of the book's fantasy elements: "Instead, the magic amounts merely to the introduction of one more unassimilable element to this gallimaufry of a novel. ... Lethem's best use of a magic ring would be to bring [famed editor Maxwell] Perkins back to life."
Even those who loved the book felt that they had to slight the roots of its author. In Salon, Peter Kurth, even while writing that the book "places [Lethem] in the first rank of American novelists," felt that he had to accompany that praise with a backhand slap at the
"definitely marginal genres in which he'd previously worked—mysteries, westerns and sci-fi's."
It bothers me, this inability to take a book on its own merits, particularly such a masterful work as this one, which Lethem was born to write. Those reactions tell us that this is about more than just the book. This is about us, about the mainstream's distrust of the genre that we love, particularly where words are concerned. You can rise only so far, seems to me to be the message. If you want entry into literature, and you began in science fiction, you must set aside those childish things. If you want admission into the inner circle, you must leave the stuff of flying rings and superheroes behind. (The only reason that Michael Chabon was able to get away with it is because he did not begin as one of us, and so the critics were able to take The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay as ironic and postmodern, rather than as the loving tribute it truly was.)
Here's hoping that Lethem, like his characters, tunes the naysayers out, and always remembers the eternal power of magic rings. Knowing him, I have no doubt that he'll keep the faith.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly decades ago, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, in addition to editing
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. Currently, he also edits SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel. His most recent short story appears in the new anthology Men Writing Science Fiction as Women, edited by Mike Resnick.
