All of us make mistakes along the way. . . There’s no value in persecuting someone for trying to overcome their history in making a better future.
Not being a fan of crime fiction in general, I was perhaps the last American reader to be unfamiliar with Walter Mosley, the NYT bestselling author of over fifty novels. I now think I have some catching up to do, for I knew I was in the hands of a master storyteller from the opening scene where I learned that CC mostly lived with his father, who called him Cornelius. The times he spent with his mother were magical because they ate out every night and she told him things that made his body tingle.
Cornelius is a good kid who commits a rash act just as his father dies and his mother disappears with a mobster. Drawing on her street-smarts and his erudition, CC remakes himself into Professor John Woman and builds a career on the thesis that history is subjective in the retelling and therefore unknowable—a revolutionary notion that brings both acclimation and castigation. But as the rhetorician finds the mystery of his own history too weighty for words, the great riddle lies in predicting how he will shape his own future. Here is a detective story, a cult story, a love story of sorts, and a philosophical diatribe akin to “Crime and Punishment” with so many escape clauses it took the author twenty years to shape the plot. You can listen to him talk about the process in this brief interview.