Wednesday's Written Word: Too Young, Too Brooklyn, Actually

Blog note: Another day, another re-emerging blog series. Wednesdays used to be the home of Wednesday's Written Word, a forum for excerpts of excellent books -- and I think I'll stick with it. Today, we explore Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude.

Jonathan Lethem is one of those media darling Brooklynite authors, one of those Dave Eggers-lite 826NYC folks. There's a good chance he lives around the corner from Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer, bumps into Vendela Vida when getting Starbucks in Williamsburg. Dude's published pieces in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Harper's, The Paris Review and McSweeny's. But stylistically, Lethem couldn't be farther from his hipster outer-borough friends. He makes you turn the page by grounding his fiction in identifiable reality, not by engaging in fits of wordplay and twee literary games. Each style has its merits, but Lethem's is grittier. It all coalesces to make The Fortress of Solitude, a '70s coming-of-age novel that roars off the page like the streetwise cousin of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

I thought a lot about what passage to pick, and I decided on the book's perfectly spun opener. To give you anything else would spoil this magical reading experience.

Like a match struck in a darkened room:

Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o'clock on an evening in July.

The girls murmured rhymes, were murmured rhymes, their gauzy, sky-pink hair streaming like it had never once been cut. The girls' parents had permitted them back on the street after dinner, only first changing into the gowns and brushing their teeth for bed, to bask in the orange-pink summer dusk, the air and light which hung over the street, over all of Gowanus like the palm of a hand or the inner surface of a seashell. The Puerto Rican men seated on milk crates in front of the bodega on the corner grunted at the apparition, not sure of what they were seeing. They widened their lips to show one another their teeth, a display to mark patience, wordless enduring. The street strewn with bottle caps half-pushed into the softened tar, Yoo-Hoo, Rheingold, Manhattan Special.

The girls, Thea and Ann Solver, shone like a new-struck flame.

An old white woman had arrived on the block before the Solvers, to reclaim one of the abused buildings, one which had been a rooming house, replacing fifteen men with only herself and her crated belongings. She was actually the first. But Isabel Vendle only lurked like a rumor, like an apostrophe inside her brownstone, where at this moment she crept with a cane between the basement apartment and her bedroom in the old parlor on the first floor, to that room where she read and slept under the crumbled, unrestored plaster ceiling. Isabel Vendle was a knuckle, her body curled around the gristle of old injuries. Isabel Vendle remembered a day in a packed boat on Lake George, she scratched letters with a pen dipped in ink, she pushed stamps against a sponge in a dish. Her desktop was cork. Isabel Vendle had money but her basement rooms stank of rinds, damp newspaper.

The girls on wheels were the new thing, spotlit to start the show: white people were returning to Dean Street. A few.