John Woman (2018)
By Walter Mosley
Atlantic Monthly Press, 320 pages.
★★★★
“The hierarchy of history
rarely documents its greatest heroes—they’re too busy doing to waste time on
legacy.” You probably don’t expect to pick up a Walter Mosley novel and read such
a line. After all, he’s best known for his sharp-tongued, hard-boiled detective
novels that draw comparisons to Raymond Chandler. Mosley has long been known
for his jump-off-the-page lines and his African-American protagonists, but John Woman is another thing altogether:
a book that’s both a mystery and philosophy of history.
The story catches fire in
1995, when protagonist Cornelius (“CC”) Jones is 16-years-old and is caring for
his father, Herman, the projectionist at a silent movie house in Brooklyn
operated by the tyrannical Chapman Lorraine. The latter is trying to squeeze
every last dime from the old Arbuckle Theater—a task that means neglecting the
building, Herman, and ticket-taker France Bickman—but mainly he’s just for the
right moment to fire his employees and shutter the old barn. Herman is
prematurely worn out physically and emotionally. He managed to escape
Mississippi during the days of Jim Crow and make his way to New York, where he
met Lucia Napoli, and Italian-American firecracker. They produced CC, but Lucia
was simply too free-spirited to contain, and bolted when CC was just a child.
To say that Herman is an unconventional
single father hardly scratches the surface. He is also an autodidact who
overcame childhood illiteracy and schooled himself in history and philosophy.
Forget Dr. Seuss and childhood primers; CC’s childhood bedtime stories came
from such unlikely writers as Thucydides, Herodotus, Plato, and the Durants.
Before he was 12, CC was expected to have views on Marx and Aristotle. Of
course, at some point, a lad also comes of age. Circumstance forces CC to
accelerate his maturation. He’s secretly covering for father at the Arbuckle,
and is clandestinely initiated into life’s carnal pleasures by policewoman
Colette Margolis, who is investigating Lorraine’s disappearance.
Be prepared for numerous inappropriate
relationships; John Woman is not a novel
that deals with the lives and values of the material- and status-conscious middle
class. Quite the opposite; it moves from society’s bottom rung to the top half
of the ladder. When Herman passes away—mourned only by his son, France, and his
unpaid Irish housekeeper—CC finds that he has come into a legacy of the
financial kind. John Woman is partly
about reinvention, and we leap ahead to the year 2013. CC disappeared several
identities ago. After obtaining degrees from Harvard under one name and some
creative paperwork under another, he is now John Woman—there is a reason for
the surname—an assistant professor of history at the New University of the
Southwest in Arizona.
If you’re thinking, ho hum,
another novel about a kid saved through education but worried about being
exposed as a fraud, you couldn’t be more wrong. John/CC teaches a course titled
Introduction to Deconstructionist Historical Devices and is widely acknowledged
to be a genius and an iconoclast. Woman’s students love him—once they get him—but
most of his colleagues loathe him. His approach to history is revolutionary;
Woman insists that, “history is what is left over after all living memory has
been erased.” Readers recognize this as confessional on one level, but Woman
also asserts that history’s primary meaning lies with its future uses because
all history is, at best, fanciful speculation based upon incomplete evidence.
Even if you’re not a historian, you will find yourself drawn into John Woman’s
methods and deductions. Call it an unconventional kind of detective work.
If you are a professional historian such as I, you will either read these
passages and scores of other musings as affirmation of the dynamic nature of
inquiry, or you’ll be outraged by how cavalierly John Woman dismisses
traditional evidence. This tension is Mosley’s point. Woman’s colleagues think
he’s a fraud; or is it that they are intimidated that he might expose them as
being such? It doesn’t help that he’s not an outwardly warm person and, as we
learn, not one who follows rules—more inappropriate relationships. Worst of all
in the eyes of some, the college administration and a rich board member named
Willie Pepperdine seem to love John Woman.
Here’s where the novel takes
a twist that I found problematic. Without revealing too much, it seems that the
school’s founders and leaders are more than one sees on the surface. There is a
shadowy Illuminati-like organization called the Platinum Path of “strong-minded
intellectuals” bent on saving humankind from itself. John Woman finds himself
in its orbit, but does he wish to land? Can he escape the fact that he’s not
yet history, as not all “living memory has been erased.” See John run, but can
he hide?
I adored the first three
quarters of this novel. I’m conflicted when Moseley goes Dan Brown on us. John Woman is so smart and provocative
that I feel compelled to pull my critical punches, but it sure feels as if
Mosley wrote himself into an existential corner from which only a dodgy
contrivance could extricate him. I was fascinated by Herman, who was indeed a
hero too busy doing to be concerned with legacy. John/CC is equally intriguing
as a deconstructionist of both himself and the discipline of history. I would even
consider using parts of Mosley’s book in a history class; it’s that
thought-provoking. In the end, I was drawn to the remark that truth is found in
“actions not your convictions.” I found considerably more veracity in Mosley’s
characters than in a Platinum Path that seemed more a rusted tin cliché.
Rob Weir
-->
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment