Being not a review of Fortress of Solitude

I'm being blown apart by Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude.  I haven't finished it yet, so I can't say it's best novel I've read in the past few years, but so far, a fifth of the way through, it's already taught me more about technique than possibly any other novel, The Line of Beauty excluded.  I have a strange, almost paternal reaction to critiques of it: the review by William Skidelsky in the London Review of Books, for instance, may be interesting enough in its structural observations, but it makes very little of the endless mastery of ventriloquism on display in every single sentence in that book.   On the flip side, we have the useless reviews by any number of newspapers; either (on this side of the Atlantic) mindlessly congratulatory or (on the other side) vague but mostly positive. No one seems to have done justice to the purely belletristic pleasures of the novel, and, once I'm done reading it---PhD be damned---I intend to do exactly that.