Somebody spilled coffee on page 7 of Walter Mosley’s Walkin’ the Dog & the Paoli Library, 800 square-foot edifice that it is, tucked away in the back of the local Wachovia Bank branch, stamped “withdrawn” across the inside front cover & sold it for all of 25¢. I splurged and bought it, Barry Hannah’s Yonder Stands, Ellen Gilchrist’s Net of Jewels & Norman Podhoretz’ Ex-Friends (proof positive that this was, in fact, a splurge) for one dollar.
I’ve been reading Mosley’s books for over a decade – I find intelligent crime mysteries a good palette cleanser between heavier or more dense books & this was my sequel to The Guermantes Way. However, like Mosley’s previous Socrates Fortlow book, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, this really isn’t a novel. Nor, frankly, is it truly a collection of short stories, tho one might characterize it as linked tales & be the least inaccurate of all. Not unlike Blue Light, Mosley’s first (but apparently not last) foray into sci-fi, the Socrates Fortlow works are all about what narrativity might be when it’s not thrusting you along the ineluctable locomotive of plot. In this sense, the books are kin to something like Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren & even the later works of Thomas Pynchon, Vineland & Mason & Dixon. All strike me as works of fiction that approach what Viktor Shklovsky once called plotless prose.
Not that any of these are anti-narrative, if by narrative we understand it literally – as the unfolding of meaning in time. Rather, all simply withhold that unfolding from its traditional displacement onto plot. Pynchon, for example, strikes me as wildly in love with plot devices, as such, so much so that his more recent books foreground these precisely by letting the referenced world implied by his language wander & stray. Dhalgren does something similar, but for different reasons – Delany’s really interested in the ideas that map a constructed world. Walkin’ the Dog is closer to Dhalgren in spirit than to Pynchon, tho I think what Mosley is trying to sketch out isn’t ideas so much as it is character, particularly one who isn’t reflective or clear to himself.
I recall, close to 30 years ago, Kathy Acker thinking aloud something very much like this – how does character arise out of words, phrases, syntax? In one of her early novels, she appropriates plot from a variety of sources, including some court documents I passed onto her (I had been using the backsides as typing paper, literally), imposing the names of her “characters” – her friends – against a series of disparate materials. Does Phil Harmonic remain the same if his name is superimposed over a porn novel, pop fiction, a political document or in re van Geldern? It was around this same time that Acker “gave a reading” in Berkeley by sending over three of her recent lovers with instructions to discuss her.
There is, of course, a long & not always distinguished history of the unreliable narrator in fiction, generally. Lolita’s fate is only disclosed in a faux academic forward. Benjy, in The Sound and the Fury, lacks the ability assess what he sees, even as he sees everything. Etc. What Mosley is up to in Walkin’ the Dog is, in its own way, a lot closer to Acker’s construction of persons through arbitrary mechanisms than the psychological realism, a kind of tromp l’oeil narrative gesture, feigned in works like Lolita.
Socrates Fortlow’s model, tho, isn’t a person at all. It’s a type, a variation on the mystery novel hero, precisely the sort embodied so effectively by Easy Rawlins in Mosley’s earlier books, the ones that made him justly famous. Like Robert Parker’s Spencer, the perfect NPR-listening, gourmet-cooking, in-touch-with-his-inner-child ex-cop, Easy Rawlins’ ability to comprehend, articulate not only his Self but his limits renders him infinitely likeable to an audience, accessible & sympathetic. Socrates Fortlow, tho, is much closer to another Parker character from the Spencer series, the lethal black Other, Hawk, who may be Spencer’s partner & lifelong friend but who is capable of a level of violence that renders him a destabilizing element from the perspective of all of Spencer’s adversaries in novel after novel. The bad guys may not fear Spencer, but they’re cautious around Hawk. Easy Rawlins has a similar sidekick, the sociopath Mouse.
Fortlow is the tale told from the vantage of a Hawk or Mouse, with no Spencer or Rawlins to fall back on & no mystery to solve either. Fortlow’s back story is that he’s a black man in his sixties who spent most of his life in prison in Indiana for murders – one of them of his girlfriend – which he did in fact commit. He’s on the streets again, in LA, working in a supermarket, living in what amounts to a squat. He’s not all bad – he has a two-legged dog named Killer & a young friend, Darryl, whom he’s mentoring Big Brother style through a series of foster parenting placements. Like Hawk or Mouse, Fortlow is never very far from violence – there are places in this book when he comes across more as a form of pure anger than anything else. He’s inarticulate in some critical places (at the very end of this book, when he has a chance to consolidate a real victory, he can’t do it, because he doesn’t believe in the world in which that could happen). Women sometimes frighten him or perhaps it’s who he becomes around them that disturbs him so.
The book is written through Fortlow’s perspective in the third person, standard detective fare. But many of these tales really wouldn’t work as short stories – there’s not enough conflict, the movement is too opaque, the shift depends on what you read in another tale early on. Some of them are very quiet – yet one of them is (literally) a riot. The arrival of high drama shows up almost as disjunctively as the way Eisenstein introduced color midway through Ivan the Terrible – there’s no preparation for it, but it transforms the scale of every other detail in the work entirely. That is not, as Mosley knows, unlike how violence works – it takes all the loose data of everyday life, casting it all into a high contrast relief from which it can never afterward be divorced.
It feels in places as if Mosley is painting a figured abstraction in this book – not unlike de Kooning’s women, for example. You can see the figure there and yet you can’t really. He isn’t using the tools of a poet – he has a good sense of language, an ear for dialog and the ability to know what both sentence and paragraph can be – something he shares in his genre work with Elmore Leonard, perhaps, but not Parker, whose prose is weak tea indeed. Mosley is painting with the devices of the mystery story, but not giving us a mystery. He wants us to see Fortlow, even more than Fortlow can see himself, but Mosley also wants us to see the paint & canvas, all these literary devices, to appreciate them for exactly what they are.
He tried this earlier in Blue Light, his first venture in science fiction, which is something of a disaster of a book, or so I recall feeling when I read it some years back. In Walkin’ the Dog, that same post-narrative impulse is at work, or maybe at play, but now it moves with pacing & efficiency – it’s even elegant in its digressions, which can be more important than the frame tale out of which they arose. A trip to a nursery to buy a tree may be the high point of the book: the clerks are taking advantage of Fortlow and he has no clue.
Mosley’s not the first genre specialist to show just how much more he might be capable of doing. You can see Stephen King, with his wonderful sense of sentence & paragraph, chomping at the bit to write beyond his tales of terror. Mosley here has given us something akin to a cubist fresco of the anti-detective story. It’s not perfect, but it works darn well.
