Brooklyn. The name floats constantly in the air, calling to hipsters of all ages from across the globe. As a resident of Washington, D.C., I have seen numerous people I know move there, some returning to Washington, some staying behind on that distant island to the north with its beckoning neighborhoods — Bed-Stuy, Park Slope, Williamsburg. Just as Manhattan was once (and still is) the source of all-consuming New York City naval gazing, Brooklyn has now seized its own chunk of the self-obsessed NYC mantle. “Brooklyn is the new Manhattan,” Ted Danson’s editor character told Jason Schwartzman’s Jonathan Ames character on the HBO series, Bored to Death.  Sadly, it was only half a joke.

Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude is perhaps the gold standard for Brooklyn narcissism. It follows the story of Dylan Ebdus, a white kid whose parents were part of the early wave of gentrification in the 1970′s, Fortress of Solitude is about how contemporary Brooklyn came to be than it is how Dylan Ebdus grew into adulthood there. Long and rambling, most chapters serve to celebrate some aspect of Brooklyn’s history, painting the city with obtuse sentences that sound good as they roll into the brain from the page (or in my case, my Kindle), but when considered for too long hardly make a bit of sense.

Just as race relations and gentrification are the sources of modern Brooklyn’s conflicts (one need look no further than Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing to see that gentrification has long been a concern for the borough), race relations inform the central plot of the novel. Dylan, being a living racial experiment for his Utopian mother, is the one white boy in a black neighborhood and black public school. Thus he is bullied and harassed for his whiteness by a sea of faceless black children. With the exception of his friend Mingus Rude, most black characters in the early part of the novel are pretty much the same character — a dehumanized other who exist solely to “yoke” Dylan for pocket change. If anything, Dylan’s experience is a reflection of white anxiety more so than the reality of race relations. Dylan’s experience is, I think, oversimplified and stereotypical. The reality of minority whites in a majority black city is much more complex — as a father with children in a D.C. public charter school, I can say with some authority that the brutalization of Dylan’s daily life does not reflect the reality my daughters see every day in our city. As a human being, I’m offended by the simplification of many of the book’s black characters.

Dylan drifts through the tumultuous 1970′s reading Marvel comics, seeing the emergence of disco, punk and hip hop, and incongruously receiving a magic ring from a flying homeless man. Literature enthusiasts will no doubt enjoy the “magical realism” of this ring, which is barely explained and may not actually be real. But as a longtime reader of fantasy, particularly contemporary “slipstream” fantasy that has its own literary ambitions, I have to say that Lethem handles the ring rather clumsily. It seems incredibly out of place in Dylan’s bildungsroman, and does not help the sprawling, unfocused narrative.

In the end, Fortress of Solitude became a chore to finish — as my enthusiasm waned, I found it harder and harder to get through its pages. Perhaps if I aspired to one day move to Brooklyn, I would have had a different experience with the novel — but as I have no affection for that magical borough, I can confidently say that this book is not for me, or others not already enamored with it.