-- Wendy Smith

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The Fortress of Solitude, A Novel; Jonathan Lethem; Doubleday: 470 pp., $26

"Let's pretend that I want to write a novel concerning the people or some of the people with whom I grew up," James Baldwin, a native son of Harlem, once proposed in a talk called "Notes for a Hypothetical Novel." What would this novel be like? For one thing, "the social realities with which these people ... were contending can't be left out of the novel without falsifying their experience. And -- this is very important -- this all has something to do with the sight of that tormented, falling down, drunken, bleeding man I mentioned at the beginning. Who is he and what does he mean?"

In his sixth novel, Jonathan Lethem has written a book uncannily to the specifications of Baldwin's grand hypothesis. In "The Fortress of Solitude," Lethem's narrator is a rare white kid in a black and Puerto Rican neighborhood, the son of a fanatically solitary abstract painter and a flaky, pot-smoking mom in 1970s Brooklyn. He's a boy in just about the same role of odd man out that Baldwin described more than 40 years ago: "I only knew Negroes except for one Jewish boy, the only white boy in an all-Negro elementary school." As for that tormented, bleeding, falling down man, here his name is Aaron X. Doily, a homeless drunk whom Dylan Ebdus, the white kid, sees dropping from the sky one day.

Doily may be a human wreck, but he is also something of a comic-book superhero: the possessor of a magic ring that enables him, however poorly, to fly. Expiring in a hospital, he passes the ring and its powers along to Dylan, who shares his new capacities with his best friend, Mingus Rude. Dylan and Mingus are close friends into adolescence. They come together over an identical taste in comics, and as they grow up and culturally move on, they make a silent deal of unconditional acceptance: "What was new in the other you pretended to take for granted, a bargain instinctively struck to ensure your own coping on the other end." It would be a mistake not calling this love, and the boys handle their supernatural powers in much the same way as their love -- as something awkward, astonishing, fitful and private.

Can white men talk? "The Fortress of Solitude" is a funny and very sad book, exceptionally well made and keenly observed. It is what lots of contemporary novels mean to be and few are: both intimate and vast, giving us social and private realities without seeming to falsify either. Lethem has done something remarkable.