There is something to be said when one of my favorite authors
steps outside of his detective series (Easy Rawlins and Leonid McGill) to
present a thought-provoking novel that stirs one’s intellectual and moral code.
John Woman is such a novel.
I was intrigued by the title and couldn’t wait to follow the transformation
of the main character Cornelius Jones (aka CC), the teenage son of an Italian-American
woman and a self-educated older black man from Mississippi. Up until his father’s death, CC took over his father’s
job as a projectionist at the Arbuckle theater, a New York City landmark, to pay
the bills and keep food on the table. But one night when he was confronted by Chapman
Lorraine, the theatre owner, he lost it and committed the heinous act of
murder.
Fast forward many years later and CC has become John Woman, a
history professor pushing the boundaries of his students and pulling from his
father’s philosophical teachings in his class: INTRODUCTION TO
DECONSTRUCTIONIST HISTORICAL DEVICES at a southwestern university in Arizona. Along
the way there’s the Platinum Path, a secret society founded by the “guru of meta-psychic-determination—Service
Tillman.” Without adding any spoilers, this secret society plays a key role
when the police arrest him for murder.
This novel pushed the boundaries of how history and storytelling can
change the narrative of how we perceive things. Mosley dives deeply into Greek
philosophy and the impact it has on man’s existence. While I learned a lot,
there were definitely moments when certain parts were quite dense. But I pushed
through simply because I was engaged with the complexity of John Woman and how
he navigated hiding himself then facing the consequences of what he did when he
was a teenager.
The characters (parents, students, professors, lovers, law
enforcement, etc.), their dialogue and the situations they found themselves in were
realistic. The world we live in is quite chaotic, but the characters held the story
together with a few silver linings. So, while this novel may not be for
everyone, it left me satisfied yet wanting to see more of John Woman.
Two thumbs up!
Side note: I learned
that Walter Mosley took twenty years to write this book because he couldn’t
figure out the ending.
Some of my
favorite lines:
Cornelius couldn’t
imagine sleeping under the roof where his father died, so instead he moved into
a cheap motel called The Starlight. The Arbuckle had a deal there for
out-of-town visitors who came in for the few festivals the theater hosted.
CC spent the next week reading death
notices from his birth year. The Summers family—mother, father and newborn son
Anthony—had died in a car crash outside Philadelphia.
Dead-alive Anthony
Summers applied for a social security number at the age of eighteen. He’d attended
school in Queens then CCNY for one semester. Tony’s essays, forged grades and
test scores (after graduation) were good enough for a transfer to Yale.
At the end of his
junior year Tony had his first name legally changed to John, after Violet’s
cuckhold husband, and his last name to Woman in homage to Detective Margolis
making him say, “I am your woman.”
He kept using the
name Anthony Summers until after entering graduate school at Harvard.
He was a new man
in a new world ready to live life freely and without consequence.
***
Years later John Woman would blame it all on
the magazine.
If he hadn’t
been in the throes of masturbation when the irate theater owner burst in, CC
wouldn’t have felt rage along with being scared. He would have feared the
threat of losing the job but this would have been a boy’s fear, not a man’s.
Boys submit to the greater power but sexual man responds with violence, the
historian wrote in his private electronic journal.
Rating: 4 Stars
Comments
Post a Comment