Review: Down the River Unto the Sea

Down the River Unto the Sea by Walter Mosley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ll put myself in the front rank of Walter Mosley fans. I’ve taught Devil in a Blue Dress so many times that the spine is cracked and the margins are full. I’ve read almost all of the Easy Rawlins novels, many of them multiple times. And I’ve done scholarship on him, presenting at a conference and working up a couple drafts of an essay on him.

Mosley started out his career as brilliant as he has ever been. Devil in a Blue Dress has its clumsy narrative moments, but it’s an extraordinary reimagining of the detective novel as a lens to examine not just race – which it justly receives a lot of attention for having done – but also masculinity.

The more Mosley wrote, the more skilled he became, working through a lot of the clumsiness and – through the Mosley novels – exploring the changed nature of race in America. (I still love the title of the essay I have never quite finished: “A Line of Any Color is Still a Colored Line.) Racism didn’t end with the 1960s, of course not, but its manifestations changed, and Mosley was right there, tracing them through Easy’s adventures. The brilliance of the original insight got more and more attenuated, but he generally kept the novels fresh and compelling.

Here, as we move outside the Easy novels, Mosley is on top of his craft, but it feels as if he’s imitating himself. Joe King Oliver has a fair bit of Easy in him; he’s a decent man who, having been framed as a cop, tries to keep his head down from the “villainous” powers that be. Even more like Easy, he has a sociopathic friend – not Mouse here but rather Mel – who trades in the amoral violence he can’t quite stomach himself.

There are a couple mysteries in tandem – a convicted cop-killer who’s really more an African-American activist and then the reemergence of the case of his own framing – but that’s part of the formula.

Mosley is too good for this to be entirely disposable, and I like the glimpse of his method when he has to start from scratch after the many Easy and later Socrates Fortlaw novels, but this is too familiar to be all that memorable.

There’s nothing especially difficult here, but it isn’t Easy either.


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