By Patrick Anderson,
whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers@aol.com
Tuesday, October 23, 2007; C01

BLONDE FAITH

By Walter Mosley

Little, Brown. 308 pp. $25.99

Last week I read two novels that are said to be the end of two admired American series. Walter Mosley's "Blonde Faith" is the 10th of his novels about the African American private eye Easy Rawlins and, based on the final scene, it does look like curtains for Easy. Philip Roth has said that "Exit Ghost," the ninth of his Nathan Zuckerman novels, is the last we'll see of the fictional novelist whose career so resembles his own. If I am tentative in writing off Rawlins and Zuckerman, it is because, by and large, novelists are not to be trusted. Roth killed off Zuckerman's brother Henry in "The Counterlife," only to miraculously return him to life, and in a previous Rawlins novel, Easy's best friend, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, dies, only to be brought back by the voodoo of their friend Mama Jo. Between Roth's literary magic and Mama Jo's Louisiana magic, anything can happen.

Philip Roth and Walter Mosley are not names often linked in literary circles, but their fiction has similarities. One writer has delved deeply into Jewish identity, the other into the lives of African Americans. Each protagonist in these two novels is deeply aggrieved: the 71-year-old Zuckerman by the indignities of advancing age, and the 47-year-old Rawlins by the loss of the woman he loves and by the racism that surrounds him in 1967 Los Angeles. Moreover, each novel is in part political. "Exit Ghost" takes place on New York's Upper West Side at the time of George W. Bush's 2004 reelection, and virtually everyone we meet greets his victory with horror. Easy Rawlins, for his part, does not blame presidents for the racism he encounters. He accepts it as part of the American condition and sees himself as "a citizen who had to distrust the police and the government, public opinion, and even the history taught in schools."

One cannot push the comparison too far. Roth has long been recognized as one of the world's leading novelists, and he is overdue to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mosley is a talented entertainer who has had the courage to write popular novels that include powerful indictments of racial injustice. Each writer can give much pleasure in his own way, at least to readers who are receptive to their particular obsessions.

The formal plot of "Blonde Faith" concerns Easy's search for two of his friends, who are missing: Mouse Alexander and Christmas Black, the onetime Green Beret. (Christmas Black's adopted Vietnamese daughter is named Easter Dawn, and we will later encounter a sexy babe called Pretty Smart and an unhappy husband named Pericles Tarr; Mosley lets his imagination run wild on names.) Some killers show up early in the novel, looking for Black, and they return near the end to be dealt with, but they and the search for the missing men are not the focus of the book.

Mosley is more interested in the relationships that define his hero's life: with his family, with friends and lovers, and with all the people who either help or hinder him as he moves though a dangerous world. First and foremost, Easy is agonized by the loss of his lover, Bonnie, who is about to marry another man. He and Bonnie have been separated for a year, and he blames himself for not begging her to return. He says he's spending "every other minute trying not to think about Bonnie Shay and suicide." But there are the children to consider: his adopted son, Jesus (also known as Juice), who has a girlfriend and an infant child; his 11-year-old adopted daughter, Feather; and Easter Dawn, who has come to live with them.

Even as he suffers from the loss of Bonnie, Easy finds other women anxious to console him. He succumbs to two: a gorgeous white woman named Faith Laneer (the "Blonde Faith" of the title) and an equally gorgeous black college student named Tourmaline Goss. Just as he has white and black lovers, Easy has friends and enemies in both races. The novel's chief villain is a black man, and Easy is befriended by at least two white men. One, a total stranger, helps him out of a tight spot, whereupon Easy is deeply ambivalent: "I felt gratitude toward him while at the same time feeling that he was everything that stood in the way of my freedom, my manhood, and my people's ultimate deliverance." He's also friendly with a white cop whose "eyes were opened after the Watts riots and the horror we uncovered together." For Easy, life is a series of horrors. He recalls his experiences in World War II: "I once shot a German sniper who turned out to be a nine-year-old boy chained to his post by a teenage superior." He sums up his philosophy as: "Life wasn't good, but at least it kept moving forward."

There are too many characters in "Blonde Faith" and too many flashbacks; probably, if this is the final Rawlins novel, Mosley wanted to bring them all back for one more moment on his crowded stage. Mosley dedicates the novel to the late playwright August Wilson, and each writer has created a grand panorama of black life in 20th-century America that is sympathetic but rarely sentimental. We'll miss Easy Rawlins, as we'll miss Roth's Zuckerman, but they'll live on in novels that are honest, angry, obsessive and not easily ignored.