WRITING DOCTOR'S BLOG by NYHWRITER.COM

LOOKING FOR BLACK HEROES TO SAVE THE PEOPLE: Walter Mosley's BLONDE FAITH and Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint's COME ON, PEOPLE

Joint Review of Walter Mosley’s BLONDE FAITH (Little, Brown, October, 2007) and Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint’s COME ON PEOPLE: ON THE PATH FROM VICTIMS TO VICTORS (Thomas Nelson, October, 2007)

BY Nancy Yanes-Hoffman, www.writingdoctor.typepad.com, nywriter@rochester.rr.com,
NYHCommunications, 16 San Rafael Drive, Rochester, NY 14618, 585-385-1515

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           The ad for the latest Easy Rawlins saga, BLONDE FAITH  (Little, Brown, October, 2007) says Easy is dead. But Easy Rawlins can’t be dead. Or shouldn’t be. The leading light of Walter Mosley’s ten Easy Rawlins books has got to stick around. He’s too important to readers, black and white, to die.

             Easy Rawlins, smoking, drinking, cussing, private investigator, exemplifies the responsibilities of black dignity, purposiveness, and fatherhood so necessary for black men to carry black youth to victory. Easy, Mosley’s hero—warts and all—embodies all the wisdom, the call to arms that Bill Cosby and Harvard psychiatrist, Dr Alvin Poussaint have encapsulated in their emergency call to black men everywhere, COME ON. PEOPLE: ON THE PATH FROM VICTIMS TO VICTORS (Thomas Nelson, October, 2007). Easy’s focus on fathering and mentoring of lost black young people exemplifies the man--the men--sought by Cosby and Poussaint.

             But something happens in this latest Easy saga. It ends with Easy caught at the top of a cliff between a 16-wheeler and an oncoming car. A storm is raging as he forlornly “toasts dead men women whom I’d known and lost over the decades.” The book ends with Easy reporting, “I think I smiled, and then the world went black.”

            Of course, Easy is telling this story, so maybe he made it.

             A father himself, Easy is father to all the children of father-failures he knows. His last (maybe) thoughts are of his own children, “safe and living in a mansion. I wasn’t there to watch over them, but they had Jesus. Jesus—the boy who had always been the better man.”

             Never defeated, never hopeless, despite the loss of his longed-for love, Bonnie, to an African immigrant ("Africa was closer to the Caribbean than was America"), Easy’s apparently last words are said with a smile. But for Easy to die in an auto accident would be an abdication of the role that Mosley has chosen for him through ten eminently readable novels.

           Yet why would Mosley kill off Easy? Is Mosley sick of Easy? His readers hope not. Easy’s possible death is reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes’s death long ago. Conan Doyle, tired of his cerebral detective's popularity and wanting his public to read his long, boring spiritualist novels instead, did the only logical thing: he killed him off.

             Sherlock dies, locked in mortal combat with his archenemy Professor Moriarty, ring-leader and organizer of  Victorian crime in England. Fighting bitterly, the two men fall from the top of Reichenbach Falls to the rocks below.

             But the present-day epidemic of black self-destruction, its mythologizing of victimhood as the only way out, as described by Cosby and Poussaint, is more virulent than was Moriarty's criminal organization. As Cosby and Poussaint make pellucidly clear, it takes an army—not just a village--of real and fictitious Easy Rawlins figures, to mentor, monitor, and most of all, act as fathers to fatherless African-American children who believe in self-fulfilling prophesies of defeat before they even try.

             Many of Mosley’s books about Easy, especially CINNAMON KISS and FEAR OF THE DARK, make more cogent social commentaries than does BLONDE FAITH.  Still, it's much more than than just a fast read for a rainy night. BLONDE FAITH hones in on a black man who shoulders his responsibilities no matter what.

             As such, Mosley shouldn’t let Easy Rawlins die. Cosby, Poussaint, and the black mythology that blames Whitey for its victimization need Easy and a litany of Easys to come. For the world described by Mosley—and by Cosby and Poussaint--is not an "easy" place. It needs black heroes like Easy to make it a place for young African-Americans to learn how go forward and triumph.

FINDING FAMILY: RUN by Ann Patchett

RUN by Ann Patchett. Review by Nancy Yanes Hoffman, www.writingdoctor.typepad.com

nywriter@rochester.rr.com, 585-385-1515, 16 San Rafael Dr, Rochester NY 14618

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       Finding family and leaving family behind is the core of Ann Patchett’s fifth novel, RUN.  The novel begins with Bernadette Doyle’s early death.  When her sisters try to take an old family treasure, a statue of the Virgin, her husband, Bernard Doyle, refuses even though tradition has it that the statue should belong to a daughter and Bernadette left no daughter..

       RUN then flashes back to Doyle hearing the statue’s story, kissing his wife, and predicting far better than he knew, “You’ll never be old.” It ends with Bernard Doyle, old at 63, and lonely, with the family’s longed-for children running for their lives in their own directions.

        Bernadette’s death leaves Doyle to raise his weak son Sullivan and his two adopted black sons, Tip and Teddy, nominal inheritors of Massachusetts politics. For 12 years after Sullivan’s birth, Bernadette had prayed for more children but to no avail: “She prayed to accept God’s will. She prayed to stop praying, a pastime that never failed to make her feel selfish and childish, but she could not stop” (what a marvelous line!)

         Bernardette’s legacy takes hold sixteen years after her death when her family unexpectedly merges with Tip and Teddy’s half-family, their birth mother, Tennessee Moser, and her daughter Kenya. Although Teddy, Tip, Kenya, and their self-sacrificing mother Tennessee are all black and the Doyles are white, they are the family Bernadette prayed for. 

          RUN hones in on these two families finding their oneness.  RUN is about recognizing our connections, what we pray for and what we get, what parents do—and want to do--for children, and how finally children leave them behind.

           Car accidents punctuate their lives. Doyle becomes mayor of Boston but Sullivan’s Chappaquiddick-like accident scotches Doyle's idealistic political career.  Years later, another accident catalyzes their lives. Arguing with his father after the politically driven Doyle has dragged the boys to a Jesse Jackson lecture, Tip accuses him: “You don’t care about the things I care about. I don’t care about the things you care about.” Embroiled in the heat of his tirade despite the chill of a Boston blizzard, Tip steps off the curb into the path of a passing SUV. The unseen Tennessee shoves Tip out of the way and saves his life, only to be crushed by the car. Tennessee is at their side because Tennessee and Kenya have followed the Doyles since the boys were small. 

           Patchett depicts a black and white world that is less separate than it appears to casual observers. Despite the way the white world neglects its black denizens and uproots them in the white drive for neighborhood gentrification, it is being “black and poor,” not just blackness alone, that disenfranchises Kenya’s education in her poor public school and her mother’s care in Mt Auburn Hospital. Tip, Teddy, and later Kenya come into their own because they are Doyle’s children with the benefits of money and privilege. Because possibility is theirs, they seem more white than black even to themselves.

           Doyle, aging and white, wanting to invest his black sons with his sense of political responsibility, is the novel’s most interesting—and saddest—character. Immersing himself in his children’s lives, acting as both Bernard and Bernardette, mother and father, he is left behind by their aspirations which run counter to his hopes. Tip, the coolly distant Harvard ichthyologist, “who spent half his life elbow deep in dead fishes, could not endure the smell of old people.” Teddy, the “sweet one,” gravitates first to the priesthood and then to helping the poor. Kenya, “the gazelle of Union Park,” becomes an Olympic runner. Sullivan, Doyle’s only biological child, runs to Africa and then runs home.  Less burdened by guilt than his black siblings, “he dealt with the mistakes of his life by setting himself adrift.”

          When Doyle takes Kenya to get some clothes and books from the apartment she had shared with her mother, he finally asks her what her mother “does,” how she supports them. Kenya tells Doyle that her mother worked in an “assisted living” facility, that “a couple of the old people are really mean but my mother says they can’t help it.” Doyle replies, “I suppose old people are like everybody else.” Disarmed, he thinks, “He had a sudden, uncomfortable vision of himself as an old person, the furniture of his little apartment winding up in the little apartment of the women who cared for him.”

          Patchett’s luminous writing is a joy. But RUN loses something along its snowy Boston roads. Neither a plotter nor an explainer, Patchett never talks about what happened to Kenya’s father nor the father of the two boys. Are they really her brothers or are they her half-brothers? Did Tennessee begin following the Doyles after Kenya was born, which is 10 years after she gave them to the Doyles for adoption? The chapter where Tennessee dreams of her dead friend feels like an unwelcome intrusion—only because it is. 

         RUN'sThe tacked-on ending, the same problem that diminished the enchantments of Patchett's BEL CANTO, leaves its characters in medias res. Closing the book, the reader is reminded of Patti Page’s old song (remember her?): “Is that all there is?” Like Doyle, we wish for more.

        RUN is about the ways we run to and from relationships, how we are connected and joined as one family, how children disappoint parental expectations and run from family to fend for themselves. It is about the disposability of parents. Caveats to the contrary, RUN is a moving book worth running to.