The Fortress of Solitude

In the early 1970s, white families begin moving into a predominantly Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, New York. Isabel Vendle, an elderly reclusive white woman and the first to arrive, renames the area "Boerum Hill" to distinguish it from the nearby housing projects. Among the newcomers are Abraham and Rachel Ebdus, who buy a brownstone on Dean Street with their five-year-old son, Dylan. Abraham is a reclusive painter working obsessively on an abstract animated film. Rachel is a restless, chain-smoking Brooklyn native employed at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Rachel pushes Dylan outside to play with Marilla, a Black girl from the block, rather than the white Solver girls, whom Dylan secretly prefers. This guilty, unspoken racial wish becomes one of several early wounds he carries. The block's social life centers on stoops and sidewalk games, but Dylan, younger and uncoordinated, lingers at the margins. A menacing older boy named Robert Woolfolk begins appearing from near the housing projects. Robert corners Dylan and implicitly threatens to steal the errand money Dylan carries for Isabel Vendle. Rachel learns about the harassment and physically confronts Robert on the street, beating him until he cries. Dylan is simultaneously shamed and protected by his mother's fury.

Then Rachel vanishes from the household without explanation. Postcards begin arriving from someone calling herself "Running Crab," postmarked from Indiana and points west, bearing cryptic typewritten poems. Abraham cannot or will not discuss her absence. Shortly before disappearing, Rachel predicts that Mingus Rude, the son of former soul singer Barrett Rude Junior, will become Dylan's "new best friend" (53). Barrett Rude Junior, once the lead vocalist of the Subtle Distinctions, has just moved into the brownstone next door with Mingus, who is four months older than Dylan and a grade ahead. The prediction proves accurate. Mingus and Dylan bond over Marvel Comics and their parallel motherless situations, developing a friendship that operates differently indoors, where they share secrets, than on the street. On the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, Mingus shows Dylan the enormous spray-painted tags of graffiti writers, and Dylan glimpses the coded world that will bind them further.

Dylan endures the racial isolation of public school, where he is one of three white children. By sixth grade at Intermediate School 293, he is systematically targeted for "yokings," a ritualized headlock-and-frisking accompanied by racial taunting. He adopts a defensive posture on dangerous routes: head down, layered "mugging money," hidden glasses. Mingus, a grade ahead in a separate building, is largely absent during school hours. When they reconnect, Mingus introduces Dylan to graffiti tagging, and Dylan begins writing Mingus's tag, DOSE. Arthur Lomb, another white boy at the school, becomes Dylan's reluctant companion, a mirror of his own vulnerability.

Dylan encounters Aaron X. Doily, a homeless Black man who tells Dylan he once could fly but no longer can. Abraham has Doily hospitalized, and Doily gives Dylan a silver ring. Dylan sews a homemade superhero costume, names himself Aeroman, and attempts to fly from his brownstone roof but is paralyzed by fear. During the summer of 1977, he stays with a host family in Vermont through the Fresh Air Fund, a program that sends New York City children to rural homes. He has a first romance with Heather Windle, the host family's daughter, and demonstrates flight over a pond, the only successful flight of his youth. Heather rejects the spectacle.

Back in Brooklyn, Barrett Rude Junior sinks deeper into cocaine addiction while his father, Barrett Rude Senior, arrives after being paroled from prison. A rigid former preacher, Senior clashes bitterly with Junior. Dylan and Mingus begin a crime-fighting campaign: Dylan serves as bait while Mingus, wearing the ring and costume, flies down to disrupt muggings. Mingus, acting alone, assaults an undercover police officer at the Walt Whitman Houses in Fort Greene during a narcotics sting and is briefly arrested.

Dylan passes the entrance exam for Stuyvesant High School, a selective public school in Manhattan, and enters the world of punk rock. He increasingly avoids Dean Street and transfers the ring and costume to Mingus. Arthur Lomb becomes Mingus's primary companion. In August 1981, a family confrontation at the Rude house turns violent: Barrett Rude Senior produces a gun after discovering Junior's drug paraphernalia, and Mingus retrieves another gun and shoots Senior dead. Convicted as an adult of involuntary manslaughter, Mingus is sentenced to ten years at Elmira prison. Dylan, who is not present, learns of the events afterward and departs for Camden College in Vermont without looking back.

At Camden, Dylan cultivates a persona built on exaggerated Brooklyn street credibility, deals cocaine, and is expelled for academic failure and drug violations. Before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, he buys the ring back from Mingus for five hundred dollars, his entire savings.

Part Two takes the form of a CD box-set liner note written by the adult Dylan, tracing Barrett Rude Junior's musical career and framing soul music as a drama of confinement and escape.

Part Three shifts to first-person narration. Dylan, now in his mid-thirties, lives in Berkeley with Abigale Ponders, his Black girlfriend and a graduate student. He works as a freelance music journalist. Abby confronts him about his emotional withdrawal, calling his CD collection "a wall of moods, a wall of depression" and accusing him of collecting her as "the official mascot for all the shit you won't allow yourself to feel" (315). At a science-fiction convention where Abraham is the guest of honor, Dylan learns that Mingus was released from prison only long enough to donate a kidney to his ailing father before being returned to custody. He also receives a report revealing that Rachel was convicted of forgery in Virginia and arrested as an accomplice in an armed robbery in Kentucky before fleeing on bail in 1979.

Dylan discovers that the ring now confers invisibility rather than flight. After Abby leaves him, he returns to New York, walks through the gentrified streets of his childhood, and visits the diminished Barrett Rude Junior. He then drives upstate to Watertown Correctional to see Mingus. Separated by Plexiglas, they reconnect, but Mingus refuses the ring, asking Dylan to deliver it instead to Robert Woolfolk, who is in protective custody after trouble with a prison gang.

That night, Dylan uses the ring's invisibility to infiltrate the prison. He finds Mingus's cell, and they talk for hours. Following Mingus's instructions, he reaches Robert's cell and pushes the ring through the door slot. The next morning, Dylan learns that Robert escaped his cell and died leaping from a gun tower, apparently believing the ring still granted flight.

Dylan drives to Bloomington, Indiana, where he locates Croft Vendle, Isabel Vendle's nephew, who takes him to the rural commune where Rachel once lived. Croft shows Dylan the typewriter used for the Running Crab postcards and explains that Rachel left with a violent man; Croft continued writing the postcards after she was gone. Rachel's trail ends with her bail flight from Kentucky in 1979.

Driving west, Dylan listens to Brian Eno's Another Green World, which triggers a memory of a silent car ride with Abraham through a blizzard after his expulsion from Camden. He reflects on the "middle spaces" that have defined his life, recognizing Rachel's decision to raise him in Gowanus as "so beautiful, so stupid, so American" (508). The novel closes on the image of father and son "moving forward at a certain speed. Side-by-side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream" (509).