There goes the neighborhood

We're still a month away from the advent of Toni Morrison's next blockbuster, but it's already clear that 2003 will be remembered as the year white authors discovered black America. What other brief period has produced as many major works about the unresolved anxieties of our integrated society?

In January, Richard Powers published a gorgeous novel called "The Time of Our Singing" about the marriage of a black woman and a white immigrant. Richard Price followed with "Samaritan," the disturbing story of a liberal determined to save poor black kids with the power of his guilty white love. Norman Rush's "Mortals" skewered America's problematic efforts to "redeem" black Africa. Sena Jeter Naslund examined the civil rights movement from all its multicolored facets in "Four Spirits."

And now comes Jonathan Lethem with "The Fortress of Solitude," a novel of boundless energy and startling insight about the conundrum adults impose on children by demanding that they live the ideal of integration that we've been unable to demonstrate ourselves.

Lethem won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999 for "Motherless Brooklyn," and his new novel opens nearby in the early 1970s on a street in Brooklyn that's teetering between gentrification and gang warfare. Dylan is the only child of a pair of beatniks who pride themselves on their ability to appreciate the "authentic" quality of Dean Street. His father remains cloistered on the third floor, painting an abstract film frame by fame. And his flamboyant mother hauls her shy son away from comic books and pushes him into the street, insisting that he join the black kids standing around the sidewalk.

Lethem's mock-heroic voice, full of innocence and mischief, perfectly captures the challenges of childhood, the desperation to belong, the acute sensitivity to embarrassment, the unquestioning endurance of adults' absurd behavior. At first, Dylan has no idea what to do with these streetwise children, and they have no interest in him whatsoever. He's small and bookish, a weak athlete better at playing invisible than spaldeen. But his talent with a piece of chalk eventually draws him into the group and gives him tentative acceptance.

His only real position in the neighborhood, though, comes from his remarkable friendship with Mingus Rude, a charismatic black boy who's a year older. The son of a washed-up R&B singer, Mingus "was a world, an exploding bomb of possibilities." He's cool in white or black, proud of his Boy Scout uniform but hip to the hood, a bilingual genius of charm strong enough to project a force field of protection around a dweeb like Dylan.

In this bursting symphony of nostalgia, the two boys struggle to follow the byzantine complexity of superheros, plumb the nature of sea monkeys, catch the latest music, and stay fluent in the ever-evolving lingo of their block. Together, they join "graffiti writers competing like viruses, by raw proliferation," spreading over a citywide canvas with spray cans. "What's in it for the white kid?" Lethem asks. "Well, he's been allowed to merge his identity in this way with the black kid's, to lose his funkymusicwhiteboy geekdom in the illusion that he and his friend Mingus Rude are ... a team, a united front, a brand name, an idea."

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