Jonathan Lethem was raised on comic books and genre fiction, but by his teens, he'd discovered the works of Pynchon, Calvino, Cortázar and Borges. He was born in Brooklyn, New York to a visual artist father and activist mother, and raised in the Gowanus neighbourhood of Brooklyn. Educated at Bennington College, Lethem dropped out after two years and hitchhiked to Berkeley, California, where he made a living working at bookstores. Throughout all of his work shines his greatest influence, Philip K Dick, whose paranoid narratives jived with the distrust of authority and humanism already instilled in him.

Partially in reaction to the corruption of art he'd seen at Bennington, Lethem chose to begin his career writing science fiction and crime noir, in the hope of writing great novels that would be discovered later in used bookstores. But his talents were too strong to be marginalised. Perhaps he was being too humble, as novels such as GUN, WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC and GIRL IN LANDSCAPE were anything but traditional genre fiction.

The publication of MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN, winner of The National Book Critics Circle Award, found Lethem trading in landscapes of his own creation for the neighbourhoods that had created him. MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN's narrator, Lionel Essrog, an unlikely detective with Tourette's Syndrome, opened up themes that Lethem had yet to touch on in his fiction. Essrog's esoteric dialogues moved from MAD magazine to barber shops on Brooklyn's Court Street. One thing was obvious; Lethem was ready to write about his home and those things that had shaped his imagination as a child.

His most recent novel, THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, is a portrait of growing up in Brooklyn as a racial outsider obsessed with comic books, graffiti and punk rock. FORTRESS is set during the 1970s, a time when New York City was suffering intense economic problems, and follows the life of Dylan Ebdus as he finds a way to escape Brooklyn.

The first section of the book is a third person narrative of Dylan's childhood. It ends with Dylan weeks away from leaving for Vermont to go to college. In those final weeks, he witnesses the destruction of his best friend Mingus Rude's family. The next section picks up in Berkeley and is narrated by Dylan now in his thirties. He's found himself at a point in his life where he has to return to Brooklyn for the sake of Mingus, an imprisoned victim of crack cocaine.

In essays such as "Five Depressed Superheroes" and "Who's Afraid of Dr Strange" Lethem reveals his immense knowledge and fondness for comic books, and it's a passion shared by FORTRESS's lead character. Dylan Ebdus is first exposed to comics by his mother, and then by his friendship with Mingus Rude, though Mingus's love of comics is purely incidental. It's not until meeting Arthur Lomb, a fellow weirdo, that Dylan meets the kind of youthful comic fan who buys multiple copies of LOGAN'S RUN #1 and seals them in plastic. With comics being such a strong element of the narrative in THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, I asked Lethem if he'd had to re-immerse himself in the medium, or if the information was already there.

"Well, the comic books that are considered really directly in FORTRESS are almost all ones that I memorised when I was thirteen or fourteen years old, so some of them I still had on hand," says Lethem. "A few I went and dug up and revisited. But some others, like the LOGAN'S RUN adaptation, I never needed to glance at to do them justice. Those comic books will always be very much with me along with some of the books I read back then and the movies that I saw.

"I was a very weirdly timeless kid. I did go see STAR WARS when it first came out and I was buying new comics, but partly because of my parent's lifestyle which was very junky, recycled bohemian, thrift store aesthetic. So, y'know, just an instinct I had as a kid for loving old stuff... I was always as much responding to out-of-date crap as much as I was tuned in to what was new. I did read a lot of comic books that were new, but I was also constantly looking through piles of old comic books that were rotting on shelves for three or four years.

"One of my first comic book influences was a Little Big Book about Batman which was probably from the mid-sixties that someone had given me. A lot of the things I loved were not contemporary to the moment of the seventies. I liked STAR WARS, but I also really liked 2001 to the extent that I could be a buff of old science fiction movies. I was interested in, y'know, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL and FORBIDDEN PLANET and stuff."

Despite the influence of comics in Lethem's work, he's no longer a regular reader. It's probably an accurate assumption to say that he's a bit like Dylan in FORTRESS, who's moved on to other things, but still likes to check in on the X-Men every once in a while. "I'm not systematically in touch with any part of comics culture. I have some favorites among the graphic artists. Probably very predictable. Dan Clowes. Chester Brown. And those two guys are above all for my taste; although there's remarkable work being done.

"One thing that Dylan's experience doesn't reflect in mine is that I developed a parallel interest in underground comics. Specifically, R Crumb, [who] I was obsessed with as a teenager. Very very crucial formative obsession. In his own way he's as deep an influence on me as Philip K Dick. AMNESIA MOON is really an R Crumb book. Most of the new stuff that I like is closer in a way to that strain of my own interests. In regards to the superhero comics, I'm mostly a fetishist of my own small collection of circa-late-1970s material. I go back, re-read it a lot and I dwell on it. And I have a kind of morbid fascination on certain characters like Black Bolt or Omega the Unknown.

"Like everyone I was in awe of WATCHMEN, which, in its way, was an influence on FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE as well. But I haven't - even with Alan Moore - followed his superhero work that much. I find that my eye is irritated by the contemporary style of drawing superhero comics. It doesn't look right to me. That's probably a cranky-old-guy kind of thing to say. The paper isn't yellow enough and the characters aren't homely enough. They all look too much like they're made of molded plastic."

Alongside comics, another significant factor played a role in Lethem's writing. In an article for Bookforum called "You Don't Know Dick" Lethem relayed his experiences both as an avid reader of Philip K Dick, and later, working for the Philip K Dick Society digging through many of Dick's papers.

In FORTRESS, Dick's influence is subtle but present. Most notably "KING FELIX" from his novel VALIS appears as graphitti in the second section, but also Dylan's father Abraham takes on a job painting covers for science fiction paperback novels. From his Bookforum article, I knew that Lethem used to travel through used bookstores and junk shops, digging up old Philip K Dick paperback mass market books. "It was very easy to do back then," he said, "You just had to scour used bookstores. Nobody cared about them. Turned out most of those books were first editions. He never had hard covers. They were pretty special books."

His discovery of Philip K Dick was pure chance. How was he first introduced to Dick's highly paranoid and eccentric writings? "I was just reliving this with my old best friend Karl Rusnak. He and I shared a lot of these fascinations. Particularly Marvel Comics. He and I read them together very avidly. He was the real collector. The guy who really acquired most of the comic books, but Karl's dad was into Philip K Dick and brought a couple paperbacks over one day.

"That's probably when I was twelve or thirteen when I first glimpsed a book by Dick and got curious about him. That book was THE GOLDEN MAN, a collection of short stories. Then it was maybe another year or two before I really read him and understood how much I loved him and how much he was going to matter to me. That was the chance way that I learned about him."

The second section of FORTRESS begins with a switch in narrators reminiscent of Dick's later work such as RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH or the VALIS trilogy.

"Well, I wasn't thinking of Dick when I structured this book that way, but I was certainly conscious - and it was part of the design for the book that I had in place before I even began - that I had to make that switch. In a more general sense, he was the guy who introduced me to a tremendous number of narrative techniques that are very basic to my work. Multiple viewpoints. He was just a master of that, and of course I've come to understand where some of that comes from beyond Dick's own work. So when I was writing FORTRESS I was very conscious of a lot of other influences, but he's there in almost anything I ever write."

Unlike many science fiction writers, Dick was never precious. His work dealt with drug abuse and government conspiracies. Like the best of sci-fi, Dick's work was concerned with humanity and integrity. He poured himself into his work, at times sacrificing his own health. "Absolutely, he's much more instinctive," Lethem says, "Therefore a very literary writer. Too many try to do noir or science fiction or paranoid literature and make it literary. 'Precious' is the right word for it. Instead of understanding that it's a kind of writing that can be literary at its most basic premises and must be done with passion."

As with delving into the books and comics that influence his childhood, Lethem has recently switched from writing science fiction to writing about Brooklyn. FORTRESS deals with the gentrification of Brooklyn neighbourhoods and the strange chemistry a neighbourhood drifting into a new shape can create. The setting for FORTRESS is the Gowanus neighbourhood, which is in the midst of being gentrified into the real estate-savvy Boerum Hill. Around this time in the 70s, Marvel Comics was working on integrating more black characters into its universe, which is something that affected what Lethem was working on in FORTRESS.

"One of the things that I loved about Marvel Comic Books was that they were being drawn in the city I lived in and they acknowledged it all the time. When the Fantastic Four went home to the Baxter Building they were always passing people on the street who looked like they were from New York City, and they would have conversations with them sometimes. And, yeah, I was very interested at the attempts at integration. In the same way that there's a very self-conscious quality to certain elements of pop culture surrounding New York City in the 70s, because you'd laugh at seeing KOJAK or watching the movie THE WARRIORS or seeing SPIDER-MAN getting involved in a mugging.

"At the same time, these were descriptions of the kind of bankrupt and dystopian city we were in at that time. If you read a book like LUKE CAGE: HERO FOR HIRE it was as ridiculous as going to see SHAFT or UPTOWN SATURDAY NIGHT or CARWASH, but at the same time those were very direct representations of a culture that just needed to be delineated. So it was thrilling even at its silliest, the way Marvel worked on integrating their books."

Another theme in FORTRESS is that of an average person bearing the onus of being a superhero. As a child, Lethem witnessed a man dressed as a hobo-like superhero wandering down Dean Street in Brooklyn. In FORTRESS, this bum is given a ring and the name Aaron X Doily. The ring allowed Doily the power of flight, but its power soon ran out, and Doily fell back to the earth, collapsing as human rubble on the street.

In the novel, both Dylan and Mingus are graffiti artists tagging buildings and subway trains with the tag "Dose". On a youthful impulse, they tag "Dose" on Doily's back as he's sprawled out on the street utterly unconscious. Doily is found by Dylan's father, Abraham, who recognises the tag from Dylan's notebooks. In a scene reminiscent of 'The Secret Integration' by Thomas Pynchon, Abraham takes Doily to the hospital where he and Dylan keep a vigil over this recovering alcoholic. During this time, Doily passes on his ring to Dylan, who then uses it to create the persona of Aeroman, a superhero for Brooklyn. Aeroman's identity is shared by both Dylan and Mingus. Its purpose is integral to the conclusion of FORTRESS.

Doily's ring allowed a fantastic element to enter FORTRESS's narrative. At first its powers seemed like they could have just been imagined. It's not until Dylan meets Mingus in prison that the possibility of the ring being nothing more than construct of Dylan's imagination is dispelled. Towards the end of our conversation, I asked Lethem about the ring, it's creation and it's purpose.

"I guess it's probably, to the extent that I thought about it - and I didn't think about it very much - it's kind of a Green Lantern ring or a Tolkien Ring of Power. These kind of absolute items that float through stories and can be adopted by different characters. It's that pure objective correlative kind of symbol that doesn't originate anywhere. It's part of the world. Part of the universe."

Frank Smith is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York.

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