From superhero to near zero with Dylan and Mingus

Fiction: Jonathan Lethem, a writer who has swung from genre to genre, detective fiction to science fiction, here blends fantasy with meandering, vivid realism.

The Fortress of Solitude is a weighty book: long, bloated with detail, and reflective of the recent American trend towards writing an epic from the minutiae of daily life.

It tells the story of Dylan Edbus, the lone white kid in a black Brooklyn neighbourhood, and Mingus Rude, a streetwise black kid who begins by hustling him for coins but with whom he negotiates the street politics and complex rulebook of adolescence. The 1960s drift, like a slow river, into the 1980s, as both learn to live without their mothers and with the lives of their wayward fathers. Mingus's is a once-great soul singer on a downward spiral and Dylan's is an artist, working endlessly on an experimental film.

They move towards adulthood, with Dylan obtaining a scholarship while Mingus becomes mired in graffiti and substance abuse. Into all of this, Lethem introduces a little magic realism through a ring that allows them to fly and so engage in comic-book heroics, the boys tackling crime in the streets as they alternate as superhero Aeroman.

It is less incongruous than it might sound, thanks to the control of the writing. The result is both an epic of pop culture and an ultimately tragic coming-of-age tale of exacting nuance. Unlike Lethem's previous novel, Motherless Brooklyn, the emphasis is on the colour of the 1970s rather than 1940s noir and, alongside his fine ear for the Brooklyn patter he himself grew up speaking, he has produced a novel often striking in its descriptive riches.

However, like so many of his contemporaries, Lethem is obsessed with the fine details of adolescence and modern culture, and the specifics of Mingus and Dylan's childhood games, especially, are recalled with unforgiving and, frankly, often tedious zeal. Meanwhile, after the initial story comes what is really an extended epilogue, as Dylan, now a music journalist during the apathetic 1990s, returns to his old neighbourhood. Gradually, the novel grinds towards its conclusion but Lethem, as seems the fashionable thing to say, could really have done with more editing.

Rewarding as it is at times, if The Fortress of Solitude had been pruned of self- indulgence it would be a far more enjoyable read.

• Shane Hegarty is an Irish Times journalist