I've been away, sort of. I've spent three weeks in Brooklyn, without leaving home. I've been engrossed in Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, which is about a white boy, Dylan Ebdus, growing up in a black ghetto in the years before Brooklyn became gentrified.
Apart from being white and once being a kid, Dylan's life has nothing in common with mine. I don't deal with gangs of bullying black kids on my way to school every day. My mother didn't abandon me, and my father isn't a reclusive artist. My best friend's dad isn't hasbeen singer turned cokehead. I've never taken hard drugs. I've never broken into a prison, or out of one, or even been in one. There's no point of contact between him and me that I can see, but I've been living his life for three weeks and loving every minute of it.
This total absorption in another world is what makes books better than cinema. Special effects can't hold a candle to a really well written, really long book. It's the ultimate virtual experience. You can live someone else's whole life, not a couple of hours, and you live it from inside their head. And because a book like this can't be read at one sitting, it takes on a life in your head in between readings. True, you need a writer as excellent as Lethem to pull it off. Not many books are as detailed as this one. But when a book is good it wipes the floor with any movie I've ever seen.
So, I've finished the book now and I'll miss Brooklyn. Technically I have been there. A week before 9/11, years before our kids were born, I accompanied S to New York on a business trip. We had dinner and saw a show with one of his customers, who then took us on a tour of Manhattan, which culminated in a drive across the Brooklyn Bridge. We didn't stop, just turned around and came back again.
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