Bizarro Worlds

Literary Nonfiction. As a black woman and a comics geek, Stacie Williams identified strongly with one aspect of The Fortress of Solitude--its portrayal of gentrification. For Jonathan Lethem's characters, and for Williams in her own life, gentrification is a stand-in for racism--the "Big Bad" that affects education, policing, and housing policy. Tracing her experience of living in Chicago, Boston, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Lexington, Kentucky, Williams tests the limits of how far Lethem's superhero narrative frames the most American of experiences. This is part of Fiction Advocate's Afterwords series.