Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday December 3, 2010
|
THE LAST DAYS OF PTOLEMY GREY
Walter Mosley
Riverhead
ISBN 978-1594487729
277 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Carolyn See
For years I've thought that Walter Mosley, having created the incomparable Easy Rawlins, the coolest private detective in all of American literature, should just stick to Easy, and give us all the exquisite gift of that hero's wit and style every two years. A terrific series like that would be more than enough for most writers, a marvelous lifetime accomplishment.
But Mosley had other plans, evidently, and besides the 11 "Easy" books we have so far, he's given us two Leonid McGill mysteries, 17 other works of fiction and four pieces of nonfiction, including "What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace."
World Peace! Obviously, Mosley is not hampered by lack of ambition, the rules of any genre or the rules of reality that govern this planet (some of his works come under the heading of science fiction or fantasy). He's playing by his own rules, and the instrument he uses is a prose style so sweet that sometimes you can't believe that you -- cynical, grown-up person that you are -- are actually reading these charming tales.
That's the reason we miss Easy Rawlins when a new book about him doesn't show up for a few years: Whoever heard of a private detective, working out of a very scary neighborhood, that you want to invite into your kitchen for cookies and milk? Imagine setting out Oreos for Sam Spade? It would never happen. Paradoxically, it's this very sweetness that makes fear, death and loneliness so appalling when they issue from Mosley's pen.
Fear, loneliness and death are the constant companions of Ptolemy Grey, 91 years old, living in a filthy Los Angeles apartment where squadrons of mice use the floor as a playground and the toilet hasn't been flushed in more than a decade. Try being Ptolemy, who some time ago began to lose track of who he is or where he's come from; who plays opera 24 hours a day on public radio and keeps the television news going full blast at all times to create some semblance of reality even as he crumbles from despair.
Ptolemy relies on a few family members to come around every once in a while to take him to the grocery store and the bank. His great-nephew, Reggie, a nice enough guy, has been doing this for a while, but he certainly doesn't put his heart into it. For Reggie, Ptolemy is just a chore that his mom makes him do.
Reggie -- like most of us, probably -- can't see Ptolemy's real situation. The old man is paralyzed with fear. Losing his memory isn't bad enough; he's been beaten and repeatedly robbed by a dope addict who pushes right into his room and takes change from the coffee can where he keeps his money. Then another relative -- a hulking, brutish thug named Hilly -- steals Ptolemy's pension checks. Things get so bad that a strange woman in his bank asks him to help pay her phone bill. He ends up paying twice what she asked for.
OK, these circumstances are too heartbreaking; they can't go on. At a family funeral, confused old Ptolemy meets a strong, decent young woman named Robyn, who's been casually taken in by Reggie's mom.
They are part of a society that has gone steadily downhill for over a century. Ptolemy can remember times when everybody knew each other, houses were kept up and everyone went dancing. But things have gotten much worse since he was young. Now, as far as he can see, everything has been lost. "Terrible," is all Ptolemy can say, when he visits Reggie's neighborhood: Homes "falling in on themselves from the ravages of termites, faltering foundations, and general rot."
Ptolemy lives by the words of Coydog, his old mentor who stole a treasure trove back in the day from an evil white man whose ancestors had owned the lot of them. Coydog got lynched for his defiance, but before that, he gave his treasure to young Ptolemy, who has kept it hidden for a lifetime. The whole book -- the whole allegory here -- is built on the idea of thievery and the underlying desperation that usually causes it.
Because this story is a fantasy, Robyn, that pretty young girl, is able to clean up both Ptolemy's room and his life. I'm not giving away the ending by saying that those who abused him get their just reward. The plot, the pure sweetness and believability of this story, comes from the romance that springs up between the 17-year-old girl and the 91-year-old man, as together they create a world where nothing can be stolen, only given, with the limitless generosity of love.
Carolyn See reviews books regularly for The Washington Post.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
SELECTED STORIES
William Trevor
Viking
ISBN 978-0670022069
567 pages
$35
Reviewed by Ron Hansen
Although William Trevor has now published more than 30 books, won the O. Henry Prize four times, the Whitbread Prize three times and been called "the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language," perhaps an introduction is still necessary.
Born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1928, William Trevor Cox graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, with a degree in history and worked as a sculptor and part-time teacher before moving to England and taking a job with an advertising agency. In 1964, he won the Hawthornden Prize for his second novel, "The Old Boys," and became a full-time writer. He has published 13 more novels since then, as well as plays, nonfiction and a children's book.
Because of the 1999 film directed by Atom Egoyan and starring Bob Hoskins, Trevor is probably best known in the United States for his psychological thriller "Felicia's Journey." But it is the short story form that has won him the greatest acclaim, and since his "Collected Stories" was published almost 20 years ago, Trevor has generated four more books of short fiction: "After Rain," "The Hill Bachelors," "A Bit on the Side" and "Cheating at Canasta." Forty-eight pieces from those collections now constitute his "Selected Stories."
Set mostly in England and Ireland, the 48 are wry, wistful, slice-of-life stories that have been likened to those of Anton Chekhov because of their acute observations, limpid prose, and subtlety of presentation and their focus on neediness, loss and heartbreak. Though it may be heretical to say so, I think Trevor is superior to the good Russian doctor.
Consider "Child's Play." The children of two wrecked marriages are joined as siblings when Rebecca's father marries Gerard's mother.
"Thrown together as helpless parties in the stipulations of the peace, they became companions. They missed the past; resentment and deprivation drew them close. They talked about the two people whom they visited on Sundays, and how those two, once at the centre of things, were now defeated and displaced." The children entertain and console each other by exactly imitating their parents in action and voice, even venturing into the past to restage fierce arguments and illicit trysts. Then Rebecca's mother changes her mind and sues the father not just for alimony but to retrieve her daughter. The children's secret game is ended. "The easy companionship that had allowed them (to pretend) to sip cocktails and sign the register of the Hotel Grand Splendide had been theirs by chance, a gift thrown out from other people's circumstances. Helplessness was their natural state."
The Irish stories seem more pastoral and lyrical, yet the characters' forlorn isolation and defenselessness are still frequently there, as in "The Hill Bachelors." After the death of his father, Paulie, the fifth child of five, returns to the family farmhouse for the funeral and stays on to help his ailing mother with the cattle and chores.
Eventually seeking a wife, he finds the local girls he once knew are now married or unwilling to leave their city lives, and he's becoming like the other hill bachelors, "lone men, some of them kept company by a mother or a sister."
But when a neighbor offers to buy the farm, Paulie objects to his mother in a wonderfully distinctive Irish-accented English: "There'd be sheep in this house within a twelvemonth if Hartigan had it, the doors taken off and made use of, and the next thing is the wind'd be shifting the slates. There'd be grazing taken out of the big field until there wasn't a blade of grass left standing. The marsh'd come in again. No one'd lift a finger." His loyalty and stubbornness are his ill fortune, for Paulie foresees that his family will leave the farmhouse to him after their mother dies and his inconsequential life will be "no more than a flicker in a scheme of things that had always been there. Enduring, unchanging, the hills had waited for him, claiming one of their own."
In "The Piano Tuner's Wives," a widower who is blind is forced to learn his world afresh when the girl he jilted in his youth gets "the ruins of him" in his second marriage. But she refuses to use the helpful visual descriptions his late wife provided.
In "A Bit on the Side," a secretary in a London fashion business coldly divorces her husband in order to continue a desultory love affair with a married accountant.
Another writer might have viewed it as a tragedy for her when she finds that the accountant has chosen to stay in his marriage, but Trevor notes: "Nothing of love had been destroyed today: they took that with them as they drew apart and walked away from one another, unaware that the future was less bleak than now it seemed, that in it there still would be the delicacy of their reticence, and they themselves as love had made them for a while."
In the quietly poignant "Cheating at Canasta," Mallory, an Englishman who has lost his wife to Alzheimer's, returns to their favorite haunt of Harry's Bar in Venice to eat alone and overhear the bickering of an American couple. "The scratchy irritation nurtured malevolence unpredictably in both of them, making her not say why she had cried and causing him to lie. My God, Mallory thought, what they are wasting!"
Overheard conversations figure in so many of Trevor's stories, as do settings in restaurants and hotels, that one can infer that his creative method is to sit among strangers and turn an accepting, anthropological interest on their actions and conversations. Those he chooses to write about could find no one more keenly attentive, compassionate and wise than this contemporary master.
Ron Hansen's most recent novel is "Exiles." His next, "A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion," will be published in June.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
|
Advertisement * Does your clutter keep you from having company?
* Do unannounced guests get turned away? |
| Recent Stories |
 LORD OF MISRULE
THE SLEEPWALKERS
A VERY SIMPLE CRIME
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN: Volume 1
THREE MEMOIRS BY WOMEN |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
