A new Walter Mosley novel

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Atlantic Monthly, July-August 2002

Books 

A Grand Contrivance 

Together, the Easy Rawlins mysteries constitute a sprawling novel of
manners about black Los Angeles in the mid twentieth century 
 
by David L. Ulin 

..... 

Bad Boy Brawly Brown
by Walter Mosley
Little, Brown, 320 pages, $24.95 

I don't put much stock in classifying novels by genre. The simple truth is
that good writing is good writing, regardless of its form. I'm not saying
that all fiction is equal, or that engaged reading doesn't require an
active, critical intelligence. But books like Raymond Chandler's The Big
Sleep and James M. Cain's Double Indemnity are not merely great crime
novels; they are works of literature, with all the intricacy and insight
that implies.

The tricky question of genre has marked the career of Walter Mosley since
the publication of his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, in 1990. Mosley,
after all, is commonly known as a mystery writer whose reluctant sleuth,
Easy Rawlins, inhabits the same desolate, sun-bleached southern California
as Chandler's Philip Marlowe and Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer, sharing much
of the isolation and moral ambiguity of their hard-boiled universe. At the
same time, Mosley has never been a traditional crime novelist; rather, he
writes to serve a cultural agenda, and for him the mystery is less a
whodunit than a vehicle for exploring a way of life. On the most basic
level this exploration is racial: Easy is a black man in a white man's
world, and his every action requires a delicate dance with convention, with
the rigid social order of L.A. in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s?a
landscape characterized by racist cops and housing covenants and the small,
daily degradations of living on the color line. Still more significant,
though, is the way that, read together, the Rawlins books?Devil in a Blue
Dress, A Red Death, White Butterfly, Black Betty, A Little Yellow
Dog?compose a sprawling novel of manners about twentieth-century
African-American Los Angeles that owes as much to authors like Dickens and
Zola as it does to the aesthetics of noir. Here Mosley portrays a community
largely overlooked in the city's literature, a shadow territory with its
own code of ethics. This expansive vision has everything to do with Easy:
an enigmatic figure, he is less a detective than a favor broker, a private
citizen who gets involved in cases out of personal connection, and knows
hundreds of people at all levels of income, education, and class. Easy
spends time in bars, and with criminals and con men, but he also
understands the quieter pleasures of domestic life. Characters and
situations carry over from volume to volume, imbuing the whole sequence
with an uncommon three-dimensionality, a vivid air of consequence.

full: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/07/ulin.htm

===

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 23, 2000, Sunday, FIVE STAR LIFT EDITION 

WALTER MOSLEY TAKES OFF MYSTERY WRITER'S HAT TO PONDER CAPITALISM 

By Harry Jackson Jr.; Of The Post-Dispatch 

Walter Mosley is a writer's writer. His new monograph, "Workin' on the
Chain Gang," shows one more layer. 

Mosley is known for his Easy Rawlins mystery series and his series on
ghetto philosopher Socrates Fortlow. He is less well known for his social
commentary and academic contributions, such as "Black Genius." 

"Workin' on the Chain Gang" comments on how a new capitalism of mass media
and the hypnotic urge to gain possessions has created a form of slavery
that renders Americans their own slavemasters. "Television is our opium,
our nightly bowl of hazy, unfocused dreaming." 

But Americans also can be responsible for their own emancipation. "We are
part of an economic machine . . . but it is the machine, not race or gender
or even nationality that drives us." 

What Mosley writes is not new. The likes of John Leonard's "The Last
Innocent White Man in America" or Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to
Death" are equally engaging. 

But Mosley's strength is clarity. His logic superimposed over simple prose
is a mind-snapping wake-up call. 

The book is another in Ballentine Books' "Library of Contemporary Thought,"
which has included contributions from Jimmy Carter, Seymour M. Hersh,
Stephen Jay Gould and others. It is a short but engagingly easy read. 
  
It's the thinking that will be difficult. 
  


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org



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