book review–The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley
Been reading anything I might like and not know about? I don’t know if you ever read Walter Mosley, who writes the Easy Rawlins series about life in the fifties in Los Angeles, about black people mostly. His sex scenes are absurdly over the top sometimes, which is why I stopped reading him a few years ago. So junk! to steal a pithy and punchy phrase from Molly’s Yupit students. However, he has a very affecting lyrical sense, quite musical, and uses the black argot in a very funny and orignal way. With misgivings I started to read one of his latest books, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey. It is primarily the story of a seventeen year old girl and a ninety-one year old man, which is probably primarily the blessed reason why he doesn’t do his habitual over the tops. It has some very well realized relationship explorations and descriptions, as well as some rather fantastic but interesting background. If you want a short well written novel, much of which concerns what it means and feels like to be old and losing your mind and just about everything else that has ever meant much to you, and the sort of redemption one can have through friendship, kinship, and love recognizably human and physical yet Platonic (though it is admitted that this Platonic sense is caused by differentiations which acknowledge what it is to be a young girl and what it is to be a very old man, and some things are just omitted by social sense, moral sense, and common sense).
