By Walter Mosley. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010. 277 pp.
Several years ago, I overhead colleagues debating the literary merits of Walter Mosley’s work. One stated definitively that Mosley’s novels were pulp fiction, but his short stories were literary. It was an argument no one was going to win, least of all Walter Mosley, and it’s an argument that quickly becomes ridiculous if applied to the works of, for example, Edgar Allan Poe or Charles Dickens. The insurmountable divide between popular works and literature is a fiction, and a not very useful one. But I hope that after his 34 books and numerous awards, we can all agree that Walter Mosley is a writer worth reading. If you only know him from his Easy Rawlins or Leonid McGill mysteries, though, Ptolemy Grey will be a revelation.
Ptolemy Grey is old—ninety-one—and following the death of his nephew and caregiver, Reggie, he is vulnerable to the abuses of his family and the wider world. He’s frail, his memory is fading, and he is nagged by the knowledge that he has failed to complete a quest laid out for him years before by his mentor, Coy.
At Reggie’s funeral he meets Robyn, a teenager who has been taken in by Reggie’s mother. Robyn is the one who breaks the news of Reggie’s death, and she gradually takes over Ptolemy’s care, digging deeper into Ptolemy’s cluttered apartment (and the jumbled past it evokes) than Reggie ever dared.
The novel is told through Ptolemy’s words, so we get an intimate look at the frustrations of dementia. It’s a convincing and heartbreaking depiction, and one that emphasizes Ptolemy’s humanity in spite of his failing mind. Ptolemy hungers and wants and dreams like everyone else. Even his struggle to stay in the present finds an echo in Coy’s philosophical musings, “When you young you think about tomorrow, but when you old you turn your eyes and ears to yesterday” (269). Mosley shows us that dementia, and aging in general, are parts of the ordinary progression of life.
As he pursues his quest, Ptolemy gambles on an experimental (and fantastic) treatment for dementia, and his bond with Robyn grows beyond his family’s understanding. He wrestles with faith and love and his own uncooperative body, and though I hated to say goodbye to this character at the end of the novel, I found it utterly satisfying.
