The Fortress of Solitude is a very different kind of novel in many ways from Lethem's previous works. It is sprawling where he has tended to be concise, and it is more socially realistic than his other books, most of which have been mostly sci-fi and dystopian visions. But really, only the surface is different. Beneath the hard-boiled futuristic San Francisco private investigator in Lethem's first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music--a Philip Marlowe meets Philip K. Dick marvel--is the same nostalgia for a world gone by that the adult Dylan Ebdus feels for Brooklyn. Gun was the first of a series of genre-bending books that Lethem published between 1994 and 1999, but despite their disparate forms, all of them kept the idea of maneuvering through multiple worlds at their core. Amnesia Moon (1995) is about mind control and dreamscapes, but really about how people make their own realities. Lethem followed it with As She Climbed Across the Table, a nearly ordinary campus novel that dives into new dimensions when a young female physics professor falls in love with a man-made black hole in the college laboratory nicknamed "Lack" and becomes obsessed with getting through it to the other side.

All of this time, one senses, Lethem was dancing around the one idea in his head that wouldn't go away, his own parallel universe: Brooklyn. He began to creep back to it in novel number four, Girl in Landscape, where his home borough appeared in the novel's opening chapters as a ruined, ozone-depleted shell of itself, a place only worth abandoning for another planet. When his characters resettle on their new frontier, Brooklyn remains a symbol of everything lost to them. They're Dylan Ebdus gone intergalactic instead of just to California.

It was Motherless Brooklyn, Lethem's fifth novel in as many years, that finally landed him back in the old neighborhood, with a bang that woke the literary world. He dreamed up a group of orphans, some Italian mobsters and Lionel Essrog, an intense, utterly endearing amateur private eye with Tourette's syndrome. Lethem left the other dimensions of science fiction behind, finally, but created a different kind of alternate universe in Essrog's mind, a place in which words take on different meaning and all bets are off concerning the ordinary rules of conversation and behavior. "I seethed behind the scenes with language and conspiracies, inversions of logic, sudden jerks and jabs of insult," he confesses. In Lethem's hands, this half-dark world of faulty brain wiring is as whole and convincing as the streets of Brooklyn, a place into which it's possible to disappear entirely. As Essrog notes: "A Touretter can also be The Invisible Man."

Which brings us back to The Fortress of Solitude, and a certain afternoon in Dylan Ebdus's 14th year on which he thinks his whole life will change, a promise that is fulfilled but not in the ways he expects. He is given a ring by a homeless man, and before long, he discovers that it gives him the power to fly. He shares his secret with Mingus, and the two of them together--still two boys against the world despite their divergent paths, Dylan to a good high school and Mingus to full-time drug addiction--take on the persona of Aeroman, a crime-fighting superhero, complete with costume, who ends up using his powers to put graffiti in hard-to-reach places instead of to save people, as they intend. When they grow older, the power of the ring changes inexplicably, now making its wearer invisible. "When...the ring first came into my hand I believed that flying was the denominator, the bottom line of superheroic being," Dylan muses in retrospect. "Any superhero flew, even if they had to cheat by vaulting or floating on bubbles of conjured force or riding in hovercraft. So it was a flying ring. By the time I wore it again on that Berkeley hill I knew differently. Invisibility was what every superhero really had in common. After all, who'd ever seen one?"

While it doesn't lead to safer streets, finally the ring does fulfill a purpose both for Dylan and for the resolution of Lethem's novel. By granting him the power to literally disappear, the trinket gives him a way to make peace with having been somehow invisible his entire life. "I'd spent fifteen or twenty years being angry at rappers, black and white equally, for their pretense, for claiming the right to wear street experiences, real or feigned, like badges, when mine were unshown," he acknowledges toward the end of the book, soon after he's spent hours devoting himself to writing the liner notes for a box set of Barrett Rude Jr.'s music lest it be forgotten. "I'd spent fifteen or twenty years senselessly furious at them one and all for...being ahistorical and a lie...for not knowing what I knew." Apparently even secret powers can't save us from ourselves until we do the hard work alone. And if it seems a bit odd to include an entirely fantastical subplot in the midst of a novel so firmly, even painfully, rooted in the real world, well, it is. But only a very little bit. It has always been one of Lethem's gifts as a writer to make even his most futuristic, postapocalyptic universes and characters as humane and well observed as the city streets he chronicles in The Fortress of Solitude. If anyone can make you believe it's possible to fall in love with a void, or that a homeless man can fly and a prison break can be aided by powers of invisibility, it's him.

Ultimately, of course, the flying and the prison break aren't the issues: Loss is. "This change in the ring seemed a message that Aeroman had grown up," Dylan realizes. "Invisibility was sly and urban and might just do the trick. I was made ready for something." And so, he makes peace with the spiriting away of his cosmos by nasty old progress--"The O'Jays and Manhattans and Barry White ballads we'd loathed were now, with well-mixed martinis or a good zinfandel, foundation elements in any reasonably competent seduction. From the evidence of the radio I might have come of age in a race-blind utopia."--and the disappearance of his mother, and when he's done, he looks at his life head-on and sees it for the first time. "Abraham was the father I never had, and Rachel was the mother I never had, and Gowanus or Boerum Hill was the home I never had, everything was only itself however many names it carried."

This leaves Mingus, now sitting in prison upstate and not entirely unhappy about it. Dylan goes to see him, and understands that his friend has also discovered that youth flares much brighter in the mind than anywhere else, that "the stories you told yourself--which you pretended to recall as if they'd happened every afternoon of an infinite summer--were really a pocketful of days distorted into legend, another jailhouse exaggeration, like the dimensions of those ballpoint-crosshatched tits or of the purported mountains of blow you once used to enjoy, or how you'd bellowed an avenger's roar when you squeezed the trigger of a pistol you'd actually brandished in self-pissing terror. How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end."

The original Fortress of Solitude was Superman's private retreat, carved into a mountainside near the North Pole. In it, he secreted likenesses of his friends, his parents, the people whose lives he was trying to save and a host of other private mementos he wanted to keep safe and ponder on occasion. Lethem's Fortress of Solitude is its author's own time capsule--his whole world stowed away, perhaps as a touchstone for rough days ahead. Unlike Superman's cavern, though, it is a profoundly generous place, both in what it forgives and in its proprietor's willingness to invite us, fortunate guests, inside.

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