A
library for the price of a book.
The first person narrator is Charles Blakey, a 33-year-old black man
who lives alone on his inherited family house on Long Island. He
is unable to hold a job, unable to tell the truth, unable to forge many
lasting friendships. He drinks too much and disses his card-playing buddies,
rarely answers his phone, and represents the slow generational decline
of a group of never-enslaved blacks who populated Long Island since its
days as an agricultural powerhouse. He's also in deep trouble.
The house cannot be re-financed again, and he stands to lose it unless
he comes up with thousands of dollars. When he is first introduced, he
has just won some cash at poker. His cash on hand has risen to over
fifteen dollars, enough to buy another bottle.
One day, he has a strange visitor, a white man named Anniston Bennet,
who makes Blakey a strange offer. Bennet wants to rent his basement and
is prepared to give Blakey a lot of cash to do so. Blakey resists,
but soon realizes he has no other option to save his house. Here's where
the story gets creepy. Bennet wants to build a cage, a holding cell
in the basement, and he wants to inhabit this cage all summer, with Blakey
as his warden. Bennet hints at some dastardly deeds he has committed,
and Blakey is dimly aware that Bennet's incarceration is an attempt
at atonement and expiation.
This is a classic racial role reversal, and Blakey wonders if Bennet has used and abused black people in the past. Blakey knows that he should not allow himself to be drawn into this dangerous game, but he cannot resist. Not only is he saving his house, but he is also offered a chance that most black people never get, to hold the power of life and death over a white person. Mosley is too perceptive a novelist to make this power an act of liberation. It comes at a cost to Blakey's soul, a cost all the more apparent as their curious relationship becomes increasingly entangled.
Blakey's journey is reminiscent of the famous psychology experiment where some subjects are designated prisoners and others are designated guards. Both groups fall into the expectations of their role, and the guards begin abusing their fellow students as if they were real prisoners. Blakey has life and death power over Bennet, and is slowly corrupted by this power. The racial overtones of this power exchange are made clear in one telling scene. Blakey enters the basement to feed Bennet one morning and happens upon Bennet in the nude. Blakey is astonished at the size of Bennet's penis, the largest Blakey has ever seen. Another racial stereotype comes tumbling down.
Somewhere there's a lesson here, but Mosley is far too devious to spell
it out. His is a complicated moral universe, reminiscent of Herman
Melville and Ralph Ellison. There are no easy answers, no heroes,
no villains. Bennet's transgressions are revealed, and Blakey is
too conflicted to overcome his own weaknesses. Are these two antagonists
locked in a mortal battle, or are they flip sides of the same human, all
too human, will to power? Mosley's fable is a minor classic, as stubbornly
effective as Billy Budd or Invisible Man. The final denouement of
Bennet's and Blakey's deadly pirouette is no surprise, but it is
more
real than some contrived feel-good ending. This short novel proves
the dictum that fiction can be more true than some
reality.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard SeltzerA
library for the price of a book.
The
Middle East -- Context for Conflict: Iraq, Iran, Israel, Syria, Lebanon,
Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf States. Historical
background and context for understanding today's news. This CD contains
the full text of 10 "Country Studies" published by the Federal Research
Division of the Library of Congress. Each country study is presented as
a single document, in plain text form -- easy to read, to print, and to
search (rather than as a collection of over 100 separate documents for
each book). The tables in the appendix of each book are presented as html
documents. In addition, we include: The 2003 edition of the CIA
World Factbook, an interlinked set of hundreds of HTML documents, with
detailed up-to-date reference information on every country in the world,
with images of maps and flags; and some classic works of history, literature,
and religion, including The Koran and books on the traditions of Judaism,
all in plain text form. Complete
table of contents Free sample: Iraq,
a Country Study.
Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com
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