A review by flying_monkey
John Woman by Walter Mosley

challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

When Walter Mosley is good, he's very, very good but when he's bad he's horrid. Whereas the Easy Rawlins and Leonid McGill crime novels are the good side, and he does sometimes produce brilliant stand-alone work like The Man in My Basement or Down the River Unto the Sea, his non-genre work can be very variable. He has certain obsessions that seem to come up over and over again, like good people committing murder, masturbation, BDSM and protagonists who are almost (or are in fact) preternaturally gifted or special to the point of messainism. In this one, the the charismatic academic of the title is the alias of a gifted young man from New York, who kills someone in partial self-defence, has a sado-masochistic affair with a tough women police officer, and then flees and reinvents himself as Professor John Woman. The university he's ended up teaching at is a curious place founded by a new age group in the Arizona desert, and nothing is quite what it seems. He has an affair with a student (but it's okay because she's using him... uh huh...) and is in love with a whore-with-a-heart-of-gold, but really wants his missing mother back. It all comes together looking for a conclusion which never happens. It's interspersed with his lectures and writings on history which are supposed to be inspirational but come across as either pretty mundane or the kind of things you think are really clever when you're stoned. Luckily Mosley can write, in fact I think his problem is that he writes too much, and maybe sometimes he should stop and ask himself if this story is really worth telling. A well-written bad book.