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There are many things to love about Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, which I'm currently rounding up to home plate on, but this bit is absolutely my favorite:

Gabriel Stern and Timothy Vandertooth lived on Roosevelt Island, had met three years before when their families moved to the new housing there. Roosevelt Island was an enigma, carless and dogless, haunted by the ruins of a tuberculosis sanitorium on the southern shore. Residence there was like a cult membership. The science-fiction tram on pulleys which dangled beside the span of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and which Tim and Gabe rode to school and home together every day stood nicely for their resolute and impenetrable best-frienditude: they were freaks beamed daily to the island of Manhattan from their own subordinate, moonlike isle, no wonder they spoke a private language, nanu-nanu, live long and prosper.

These words spoken, in the novel, by a Brooklyn-born specialized high school student who spent most of high school hanging out with the sci-fi kids. Sound like anyone you know?

Labels: fortress of solitude, roosevelt island

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