Read in the light of his detective novels featuring Ezekiel Rawlins and Fearless Jones, Walter Mosley's Fortunate Son might seem uncharacteristic, even weird. Devil in a Blue Dress and its companions carry the reader through hard-boiled detective fiction across a sea of period detail. In the context of his science fiction books, Blue Light and Futureland, Mosley's new novel may cause less confusion, though perhaps not less disappointment.
Fortunate Son supplies far less atmosphere and characterization than his detective stories; like his other speculative works, Mosley relies upon ideas, archetypes, and a vaguely religious portentousness to move the story forward. Unlike those other books, however, this latest novel seems joyless, owing not just to its contemporary setting, but to a larger disconnect between the author's motive and his means.
Mosley writes the story in a flat, uninflected tone, clear from the book's opening passage:
Thomas Beerman was born with a hole in his lung. Because of this birth defect, he spent the first six months of his life in the intensive care unit at Helmutt-Briggs, a hospital in West Los Angeles. The doctors told his mother, Branwyn, that most likely he would not survive.
Fortunate Son supplies far less atmosphere and characterization than his detective stories; like his other speculative works, Mosley relies upon ideas, archetypes, and a vaguely religious portentousness to move the story forward. Unlike those other books, however, this latest novel seems joyless, owing not just to its contemporary setting, but to a larger disconnect between the author's motive and his means.
Mosley writes the story in a flat, uninflected tone, clear from the book's opening passage:
Thomas Beerman was born with a hole in his lung. Because of this birth defect, he spent the first six months of his life in the intensive care unit at Helmutt-Briggs, a hospital in West Los Angeles. The doctors told his mother, Branwyn, that most likely he would not survive.
"Newborns with this kind of disorder, removed from the physical love of their mothers, often wither," kind-eyed Dr. Mason Settler told her.
So she came to the hospital every day after work and watched over her son from six to eleven. She couldn't touch him because he was kept in a glass-enclosed, germ-free environment. But they stared into each other's eyes for hours every day. (p. 3)
The book continues in this direct style, leavened primarily by sometimes-sparkling dialogue, a welcome survivor from the Easy Rawlins novels. The plot is equally schematic: Thomas and his mother move in with the recently widowed Dr. Nolan and his infant son, Eric. Thomas is quiet, black, and unlucky; Eric is loud, white, and lucky. Soon Branwyn dies, and Thomas' biological father takes him from his loving family. Eric is handed life on a platter, but the people around him seem to suffer from his good luck; Thomas struggles, facing humiliation and tribulations, survives his abusive father and a career dealing drugs, winding up homeless but essentially happy before he seeks out his lucky brother. Light hurts him, or soothes Thomas, whose mother's ghost directs his actions at critical plot points.
So she came to the hospital every day after work and watched over her son from six to eleven. She couldn't touch him because he was kept in a glass-enclosed, germ-free environment. But they stared into each other's eyes for hours every day. (p. 3)
The book continues in this direct style, leavened primarily by sometimes-sparkling dialogue, a welcome survivor from the Easy Rawlins novels. The plot is equally schematic: Thomas and his mother move in with the recently widowed Dr. Nolan and his infant son, Eric. Thomas is quiet, black, and unlucky; Eric is loud, white, and lucky. Soon Branwyn dies, and Thomas' biological father takes him from his loving family. Eric is handed life on a platter, but the people around him seem to suffer from his good luck; Thomas struggles, facing humiliation and tribulations, survives his abusive father and a career dealing drugs, winding up homeless but essentially happy before he seeks out his lucky brother. Light hurts him, or soothes Thomas, whose mother's ghost directs his actions at critical plot points.
Though Mosley provides no exact year, or decade, a deep lack of realism pervades the book's setting. At fifteen, upper-crust Eric is not only a college freshman but a father, living in special subsidized dormitories for young families at UCLA. But this improbable setting seems intentional; Fortunate Son is Mosley's rumination on character, fate, and fortune: is Eric lucky because he succeeds even as the people around him suffer? Is Thomas unlucky because he suffers, or is he lucky because he remains essentially happy, even as he is uncomfortable? Do Thomas' struggles derive from his blackness; does Eric's ease derive from his privileged white background? If these questions sound simplistic and less than compelling, they seem so in the book as well.
Mosley relies on underdrawn protagonists, characters who inhabit neither their bodies nor their psyches, let alone a recognizable Los Angeles. Thomas in particular seems hopelessly naïve and mystical, fit for a Chris Rock takedown. The secondary players are no better drawn: Eric's distant surgeon of a father, Ira Fontanot, who runs the barbecue joint where Branwyn and Dr. Nolan share their first dinner, and Ahn, a Vietnamese refugee who serves as Eric's nanny, whose only lesson is to keep running and don't look back. Few readers will empathize with such bald archetypes-stereotypes, some might suggest-who poorly serve this thin meditation on character. If a person's character and fate intertwine, as Mosley suggests, the reader will want to believe in the characters to provide meaning and weight to their fates.
Mosley is nothing if not ambitious, but readers looking for Big Ideas will do better with Blue Light or Futureland, and readers concerned with Los Angeles, or the relationship between character and fate, would do better with Devil in a Blue Dress and its sequels. Fortunate Son is too schematic to engage as fiction, too contrived and simplistic to function as philosophical allegory.
Mosley is nothing if not ambitious, but readers looking for Big Ideas will do better with Blue Light or Futureland, and readers concerned with Los Angeles, or the relationship between character and fate, would do better with Devil in a Blue Dress and its sequels. Fortunate Son is too schematic to engage as fiction, too contrived and simplistic to function as philosophical allegory.
