I have recently read a most extraordinary novel. At
least, that is my opinion, although it is not shared by all of the quidnuncs, The New York Times having given the book
a discouraging review, while The Guardian
was enthusiastic. The novel is called Fortunate
Son, and is written by Walter Mosley. The novel is a parable about racial conditions
in the United States. Its detractor wrote that it began from a contrived
situation, that it allowed its message to dominate its tone throughout, and
that, generally, this theme so overlaid and
overweighted it that one could never believe that its characters were real. On the
other hand, in its praise, the Guardian
reviewer reached back to the great novelists of Victorian England, recalling even
the richness of characters that crowded Dickens’s
books for an apt comparison.
Mosley is a 64-year-old Los Angeles native of
Jewish and Afro-American descent, who wrote his first book in 1990 at the age
of 38, and has since written more than 50 works of a bewildering variety. He
made his name as the author crime novels featuring a black hero called Easy (for
Ezekiel) Rawlins, a black man of easy virtue, with a past in crime, who is
trying to go straight as the janitor of a school. He seeks a quiet life, but
has such a thorough knowledge of the black communities in Los Angeles, that
when the police run into problems contacting or finding black people they want
to talk to, they approach Easy and ask for his help. I have read half a dozen
of the 15 Easy Rawlins novels, and they have one distinguishing characteristic:
they never let the reader forget that in the United States black people live the
sort of lives that white people can scarcely imagine. As
he told The Guardian in a recent
interview: “I’ve been writing about (police brutality) for 25 years. For 450
years, the police ran rampant on black individuals, black souls. They would
attack them, beat them, kill them … if you don’t have a camera image, then you
don’t know what is happenin’.”
To anyone who
is the slightest bit drawn to crime fiction I recommend Mosley as probably the
best in that crowded field. But he has more recently branched out into more
serious work, and I notice his name now cropping up bracketed with other great
American novelists of past and present.
Fortunate Son begins
with a young black woman, who was abandoned by her lover as soon as she
declared her pregnancy, who gives birth to a gravely deformed child who had to
be kept in one of those oxygen tents to be given even a slight chance of
survival. Every day the young woman sat
by the contraption, talking to the little boy who couldn’t see or hear her,
sitting until late at night, and thus attracting the interest of a doctor whose
wife had died giving birth to a handsome, strapping blonde baby. He suggested
to the young woman that the only chance her child had of surival was if she
took him out of the hospital and wrapped her arms around him. The doctor began
to give the woman a ride home, and this casual friendship developed into a love-affair
in which the doctor accepted the woman with her baby into his home, repeatedly
offering to marry her, an offer she refused, presumably because of her lower
social status.
The two
children, although so different, grew up with an indissoluble affection, an
affection that underlay what seemed on the surface to be the total dichotomy
between them. The white boy, Eric, was first in everything, top scholar, top athlete,
every girl’s dream, whereas the black boy Thomas had difficulty keeping on his
feet, was slow at learning, yet had his own method of finding out about the
world by studying the small animals and insects in their back yard. He
developed the habit of kneeling on the floor so as to meld with the world, and
with his dead mother, who seemed to him to be still alive.
Neither boy
felt fulfilled if the other was absent, but when their black mother died
unexpectedly, the black boy’s biological father, who had never shown a smidgen
of interest in him until this moment, appeared and demanded to be given custody
of the child. Rudely, Tommy was thrust into the rigours of the poverty of Los Angeles,
subject to a raging, alcoholic father, a man
consumed with bitterness at how his life had gone, which didn’t prevent
him from leaving the child unfed for days at a time. Eventually the boy took to
skipping out of school in his efforts to keep himself alive, creating for
himself his own space, his own world in the back alleys behind his new home. He
had always shown what his brother had considered an immense, mysterious wisdom, a depth of understanding that his
white brother stood in awe of, but now that wisdom was lost on the people
around him, who, when he did not appear for school, casually wrote him out of
the enrolment, leaving him to go his own way, wherever or that might be not being
of concern to them for more than a few
moments. It is in this part of the novel that so many amazing characters
appear, many of them women full of warmth towards their children, yet whose lives
were overburdened by the hostility they had to suffer from the men in their
lives.
Inevitably, Thomas
at a very young age realized he could make a living for himself by running
messages for the local crime boss, and so he became a drug runner, as innocent
of what he was doing as he could be, until that moment when the police bust up
their gang, and thrust him into prison with a long sentence. When his sentence
drew towards an end, he was transferred to a halfway house. One day he took a
walk in the streets, and just never came back: he did not think of escaping,
just of keeping going wherever his feet took him.
One day he
called his former home, hoping to talk to his white brother, but the Vietnamese
maid, herself scarred from her experiences in the war in her country, told him
not to call again.
Eric,
meantime, was having the problems of success. He came to believe that he was
sure to bring misfortune to anyone he loved. He got himself involved in a tempestuous
love affair, exerting a deadly fascination over a girl who knew he didn’t love
her, but who couldn’t keep away from him.
The end of
the book is perhaps predictable: indeed, as I read this telescoped version of
the events, it does sound rather staged, yet such is Walter Mosley’s power with
words that you simply can’t stop turning the page, marvelling that anyone could dream up so
complex a situation and yet give it such
life that one continues, agonized, to the end.
The reader is
left wondering, which was the Fortunate Son?
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