Folding the Red into the Black or Developing a Viable UNtopia for Human Survival in the 21st Century
Walter Mosley
The fictional Ezekiel "Easy" Porterhouse Rawlins, Mosley’s post WW II, hard boiled African-American private investigator from Watts, is not in this book (but check him out!). What is in this book is a deeply human look at why and how we might start to talk to each other again.
Mosley’s oeuvre is storytelling, and that makes this tiny “UNtopian monograph” (Mosley’s words) unique. To create a work of fiction, an author begins with empathy. They inhabit not just the heroine of their story but all the characters, good and bad, central and peripheral to create a world. It might be fantastical or gritty, historical or in the future, but for it to succeed, we the readers must believe in it. We want a deep three dimensional reality that feels like the complex sometimes confusing place we call home even as it transports us to someplace we have never been. We want to “suspend disbelief” and find a truth in the telling that means something. So often this depth is lost in the screedy paradigm of contemporary discourse - more Chunky Cheese ball pit than afternoon with Socrates. The best we can usually hope for is a western town that mirrors the facade of our own views rather than the delusional ranting of the “others”. This isn’t a world, it’s a single world view.
One of the great pleasures in well crafted fiction is the narrative itself, watching it flow and unfold and seeing how the characters contend with themselves and others as they collide and flow through the story. If you’re reading a novel and you get to the end and say to yourself - nope that doesn’t sound right - then you are doing it wrong! A novel should offer pleasure, hopefully perspective and a little insight. And just because I loved The Wind Up Bird Chronicle doesn’t mean I can’t get just as much out of The Lady in White.
In practical terms Mosley is asking us to consider Capitalism and Socialism and eventually offering the titular proposition that we take a healthy dash of socialism and fold it into a slurry of capitalism to create a dish that is a little more human but still achievable in our flawed human world. What sets Mosley apart is not the content of his proposition but the process that he uses to get there. He treats ideas like characters and intuitively understands that there are not good ideas and bad ideas… just ideas and that our future will be decided by ideas plural not your idea or my idea. I know that Mosley is making a real proposition here and to be fair I am generally sympathetic to what he has to say but the real takeaway is the humanity of his approach and the hope that we might be able to find a new way to talk to each other about the things that really matter.