I’ve found myself reading a bit of Jonathan Lethem lately. Lethem is a terrific writer, and has found his niche writing about Brooklyn boys with no mothers. If you think I’m lying about that, the guy even wrote a book called Motherless Brooklyn.

MB was a fabulous novel about Kings County orphans who do side jobs for local Crooklyn thugs; the protagonist ends up as a private detective–with Tourette’s, no less.

The follow-up, Fortress of Solitude, is the story of young Dylan Ebdus coming of age, and the story of the Boerum Hill nabe coming of age at the same time. Dylan is awkward. His whiteness makes him stand out in the neighborhood. He takes part in the Fresh Air Fund and finds the Vermont countryside perplexing. He finds refuge in comic books, which will remind the reader at times of the also very good Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

Dylan’s mother, an eccentric hippie named Rachel, has left. Dylan’s best friend is his next door neighbor, a super-cool, year-older black kid named Mingus Rude whose father is a somewhat famous musician.

Like any good Brooklyn tale, Manhattan is seen as a far-off place, a different land with a different language and peculiar customs–peculiar, at least, to the people of Brooklyn.

In this excerpt, both Dylan’s and Mingus’s fathers are both on a rare trip, separately, to Manhattan for work-related reasons.

Two men, two fathers. Two fathers expelled from their lairs, headed to Manhattan for a change, dressed for a day threatening rain, having shaved their chins to make some nominal impression at their target destinations, tightening scarves with momentary vain glances at hallway mirrors before flushing themselves out of hiding, onto the street. Two fathers each sighing as they plunge down stairwells to underground trains, to endure the shoulder-jostling crowds which mill on platforms and pass through the jerky opening doors, then hang wearily from straps or clutch poles in the blinking, grinding trains.

Here’s a much longer excerpt from the publisher, Random House.

Finding myself in insomnia’s grip the other night, I padded down to our bookshelves and grabbed a book of short stories edited by Salman Rushdie. If Salman couldn’t help me sleep, I reasoned, nothing good.

In fact I found another Lethem yarn, which had appeared in The New Yorker. It was called “The King of Sentences”–a fitting title for an author who crafts some beauties–and it was about a young couple in the city who’s infatuated with a certain unnamed author for the picture-perfect sentences the man has filled his novels with for decades.

The couple finds where the author lives, Hastings-on-Hudson, and hops a Metro-North train to stalk him.

The appointed day came upon us like a sickness, and though each in our privacy might have preferred to stay in bed and sweat it out, we couldn’t have looked at each other in the eye if we hadn’t staggered out of doors, to the subway, up to Grand Central Terminal. During the short ride we held hands, fever-sweaty at the palms. Exiting Metro-North’s Hastings-on-Hudson station under a thundercloud-clotted sky, we found ourselvs the sole travelers not claimed by family members waiting in Subarus or bleeping their driver-side doors unlocked as they crossed the parking lot with cell phones clammed to their ears. The train continued on behind us, and the station depopulated as if neutron-bombed.

“This is the town of the King of Sentences.”

“This little town.”

“He could be watching us now, don’t act stupid. With a telescope.”

We blundered along something called Main Street, seeking the post office, until a passerby directed us to Warburton Avenue.

Metro-North officials will conduct a live demonstration of their “Train Time” smartphone app at Hastings station from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, Feb. 9. The next two Tuesdays will see similar app demonstrations at Brewster and Portchester stations.

Metro-North says the app covers 67 stations so far, and there have been 71,000 “hits” on the website. Riders with an enabled smartphone–Blackberry, iPhone, etc.–can get real-time train info.

“This new service allows customers to check the status of train service in real time at their home stations or wherever they are traveling,” said Metro-North President Howard Permut.  “It gives people the freedom to plan a trip and get up-to-the-minute information to make necessary adjustments while they are out and about.  We think it’s a technology whose time has come.” 

Says the press release:

Smart phones and computers will show whether a train is On Time, Late, Canceled or Delayed, including the number of minutes it is late, also what track it will arrive on and what stops it makes. 

The former Hastings on Hudson train station, nestled amidst the cutest little downtown this side of Bronxville, has been converted into the Hastings Station cafe. Dobbs Ferry resident Avi Schwartz “turned the ticket office in the town’s train statino into a modern coffee shop with minimalist decor,” reports the latest InTown Magazine.

Metro-North reports that the cafe “will occupy the entire 1,600-square foot main floor as well as outdoor seating on the plaza in front of the building. Metro-North Railroad’s 1,100 daily customers will have use of the waiting area and restrooms when the cafe is open.”

In other converted station news, last week’s Pleasantville Examiner News writes about the 129-year-old Millwood Depot from the old New York Central railroad hopefully being restored by a couple train enthusiasts, including Joe Schiavone, who wrote the book The Old Put about the Putnam Division of the old train line.

Several weeks back, some small-town hack at the NY Times wrote about similar efforts that are under way on the old Yorktown station.

The station down in Hawthorne, meanwhile, is still used for the storage of someone’s junk. A coffee shop sure would be nice.