Simple Survival

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey: A Novel by Walter Mosley (Riverhead Hardcover, $25.95, 288 pages)

“Sometimes I wonder what it’s gonna take/To find dignity…”   Bob Dylan

When Robyn, a young woman of seventeen, rekindles in ninety-one year old Ptolemy Grey, either consciously or subconsciously, the will to actively engage in life, the phrase, “Be careful what you ask for,” comes to mind.

Ptolemy’s brain is a jumbled mess of neurons, and the fuzziness of his inner mind is adeptly reflected in Walter Mosley’s prose.   There are no chapters or definitive breaks in the storyline.   Rather, the book is 277-pages of a third person account of Ptolemy – an African-American man – trying to connect episodes of his past and present in a way that actually makes sense of them.

Ptolemy lives in squalor in a Los Angeles neighborhood where local characters threaten the old man in search of his pension checks.   The initial pages invite the reader to like, root for, and sympathize with Ptolemy, but as the story unfolds, the warts of all of the characters involved are revealed.   The moral high ground is a mass of gray in this violent world in which survival is the only reality that matters.

Reggie is Ptolemy’s caretaker.   He helps him cash his checks, buy groceries, and run errands.   When he doesn’t show up for a matter of weeks, the reader eventually learns that he has been murdered.   Through circumstance Ptolemy and Robyn forge a relationship.   She takes him to see Dr. Ruben, whom Ptolemy refers to as the Devil.   Ptolemy agrees to treatment with an experimental drug that will temporarily restore his clarity but ensure a rapid death.

In the weeks he has left, Ptolemy sets out on a quest to make sense of losses he endured throughout the various stages of his life:  his loves – successful, unsuccessful, and unrequited; and, as he becomes more cogent, seeks to put his finances in order to take care of those he considers deserving of a mysterious and surprisingly significant estate.

But defying Father Time comes at a cost.   Whatever the benefits for those that remain after Ptolemy departs, the reader is left at the end to wonder if the man who must inevitably slip back to his previous state is any better off than he was before and, for those inclined to consider such things, what might await him next.

Well recommended.

Dave Moyer

A review copy was provided by the publisher.   “Mosley’s depiction of the indignities of old age is heartbreaking, and Ptolemy’s grace and decency make for a wonderful character and a moving novel.”   Publisher’s Weekly

“Simple survival is the greatest victory.”   Bob Dylan

Note:   Some readers with a long memory will see some parallels between this story and the film Charly based on the novel Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

Advertisement

This Wheel’s On Fire

Blind in One Eye: A Story About Seeing the Possibilities by David R. Ford (FordWords Publishing; 218 pages; available as a Kindle and NOOKbook download)

David R. Ford’s memoir seemed to present an intriguing premise:  Ford, an attorney in a white shoe practice in Washington, D.C. was adopted at birth.   One day someone tells Ford that she spotted a person on a D.C.-area subway that looked enough like him to be his older brother – was it Ford’s older brother (by seven years) who was kept and raised by their birth parents?   This reader assumed that the story of how Ford comes to meet the older brother he never knew, and would come to know him as a person, would make a worthwhile read.   Sadly, there are too many faults in the telling to label it as commendable.

As I have mentioned, Ford is (actually, was) an attorney.   This is something that Ford never lets the reader forget – he either feels that his readers are suffering from Alzheimer’s or he simply tells us this key point repeatedly in an effort to be patronizing…  In fact, if I had placed a Post-It note on each of the pages on which Ford repeats this grand fact, I’d have been running to the store for more supplies:   “I was a lawyer, trained to seek all of the facts and analyze them carefully…  Most lawyers think they are good writers.   Many are, at least in the technical sense; their nouns and verb tenses usually agree…   I should have tried hard to get to him.   I was a lawyer, a persuader.   Now I couldn’t hope to understand my birth father.”   (These are references on two pages, 169 and 183.   You would not, trust me, want me to list them all.)

“I wanted to get into the conversation but wasn’t coming up with anything to say…  I kept up an internal dialogue as we talked, critiquing my performance as embarrassingly stiff and clumsy.”

Ford apparently lacks an outgoing personality and he seems to want to tie this to his legal training.   Sorry, but this is nonsense.   There are plenty of gregarious, extroverted lawyers out there.   Ford just seems to be an introvert who uses his legal background as an excuse for his lack of comfort in the presence of others.

The biggest flaw in this true tale is that when Ford does meet his brother, he finds someone who is older but not very interesting.   His older brother likes to have a good time, especially fueled by alcohol, and cannot manage to stay married.   The brothers have little in common, and Ford comes to realize that his being raised as an only child – a spoiled one – may have been a blessing.

Since there’s so little substance in the meetings between Ford and his older brother, the reader gets much unexpected information concerning Ford’s relationships with his sisters, who were also given up for adoption, as well as about the members of his birth family.   But because so much territory is covered, and so many individuals must be discussed, this reader felt as if he did not get to know a single one of them very well.   Ford’s birth mother and father were alcoholics, and serial giving-uppers of their own children, and it seems like the less known of them the better.

This memoir ends up being a morality play without a lesson, except that perhaps life is either confusing or simply what it is.   A far better account of an adoptee’s experience in making a journey into her past is found in Lucky Girl: A Memoir by Mei-Ling Hopgood.   As I wrote earlier about Hopgood, she is “a likeable narrator without an excess of ego…  we can identify with her.”   If Hopgood happened to be a lawyer, it’s something that goes unrevealed in her personal – highly troubling yet satisfying – story.

Joseph Arellano

A review copy was provided by the author.   Lucky Girl: A Memoir by Mei-Ling Hopgood (Algonquin Books; $13.95; 272 pages) was reviewed on this site on June 28, 2009, and July 30, 2009.

Mother and Child Reunion

LEFT neglected: A Novel by Lisa Genova (Gallery Books, a division of Simon and Schuster)

In an interview with Jennifer Northcutt, a buyer for Borders bookstores, neurologist Lisa Genova says an anecdote about left-side neglect in a book she read years ago by neurology and psychiatry professor Oliver Sacks piqued her curiosity.   She knew the clinical manifestations of a right-hemisphere brain injury, but wondered how one could possibly cope with such a condition.

The result of that curiosity is Sarah Nickerson, 37, protagonist of LEFT neglected.   Sarah is the hard-charging, Harvard MBA-toting vice president of a Boston consulting firm who can’t recall the last time she had sex with her husband, Bob, but does keep track of her wins when they play Rocks, Paper, Scissors to see who gets stuck taking their three kids to school/daycare before work on Fridays.   Sarah’s hyper-drive lifestyle downshifts abruptly when an auto accident (she’s looking for a number on her cell phone) leaves her with a traumatic brain injury.

Left-side neglect is an intriguing condition.   Asked to draw a clock, a patient will only draw the noon-through-six side.   Food on the left side of her plate will go unseen.   She knows that she has a left leg, but her brain is unable to find it or control it, making walking impossible.

Genova tells Sarah’s story in the first person, which lets the reader in on her unvarnished thought process as she comes to grip with maddening limitations.   Sarah retains her intellect and her competitiveness, which she and Bob assume will drive her to regain everything she’s lost.   She is blunt and funny, and her pity parties are few and brief.   Oddly enough, however, it is Sarah’s relationship with her long-absent mother that truly humanizes her.   When mother shows up at Sarah’s hospital bedside, Sarah openly hates her.   The reason, which resurfaces slowly, rescues Sarah from superwoman flatness and makes her a compelling and sympathetic character.   The evolution of the mother-daughter relationship colors the novel with poignancy and grace.

Genova’s writing is inventive.   She shows the stress of Sarah’s pre-accident life in the clack-clack-clack cadence of Sarah’s four-inch, Christian Louboutin heels and deftly contrasts it post-accident in Sarah’s cane-step-drag-breathe pattern of learning to walk again.

As a neurologist, Genova is well acquainted with the pathology of brain afflictions.   Her first novel, Still Alice, is about Alzheimer’s.   It was a New York Times bestseller, and odds are good that LEFT neglected will be, too.   Highly recommended.

By Kimberly Caldwell Steffen.   This is a “second look” review.   LEFT neglected was released on January 4, 2011.

Free Fallin’