Marooned in an apartment that overflows with mementos from the past, 91-year-old Ptolemy Grey is all but forgotten by his family and the world. But when an unexpected opportunity arrives, everything changes for Ptolemy in ways as shocking and unanticipated as they are poignant and profound.
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Marooned in an apartment that overflows with mementos from the past, 91-year-old Ptolemy Grey is all but forgotten by his family and the world. But when an unexpected opportunity arrives, everything changes for Ptolemy in ways as shocking and unanticipated as they are poignant and profound.
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Walter Mosley (b. 1952) is best known as a writer of African American noir featuring his lead character, Easy Rawlins. After reading the Rawlins novel "Devil in a Blue Dress", I found this recent Mosley novel, "The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey". Unlike the Rawlins series, "Ptolemy Grey" is not genre literature. Rather the book is a study of its 91 year old title character who suffers from dementia and who is able to come to a sense of purpose and a feeling of love and responsibility late in life. Learning to be a man, in this novel, is not the same thing as growing old.
The novel is set in contemporary Los Angeles, but it shifts repeatedly in Grey's mind between this setting and Grey's life as a boy in rural Mississippi eighty years earlier. As a boy of 5, Grey watched in horror as a young girl playmate died in a fire at her home. Grey has difficulty forgiving himself for not entering the burning home and rescuing her. As a child, Grey had an older friend, Coy, who took the boy hunting and fishing, to brothels, and imparted his view of life to the child as a mentor. Grey witnessed the cruel lynching of Coy after Coy had stolen an enormous sum of money from a vicious white plantation owner. Coy gave the money to Grey before his lynching with instructions to use it wisely and Grey has kept the stolen treasure buried in his apartment for all the many years. Grey had a mixed relationship with his wife, Sensia which has also haunted him over the years. He loved her dearly while being tormented by her infidelities. With these and other matters from the past, Grey receives the opportunity to understand himself late in life.
The plot develops slowly with substantial indirection and foreshadowing. Mosley cunningly offers the reader an opaque summary of the end of the story before he proceeds with the beginning. Grey suffers from dementia, loss of memory, and difficulty of speech. At the beginning of the story, he lives alone in a small, foul apartment which has not been cleaned for years. Grey's wife, Sensia died of a stroke in the apartment more than 20 years before the story begins, and Grey has let it run down ever since. Grey is alone, tormented by a neighborhood woman who mugs him, and tended only by a nephew named Reggie. When Reggie becomes absent for several days, another young man and distant relative, Hilly, comes for Ptolemy and, after cheating him, takes him to his relative's home where Grey learns that Reggie has been killed in a drive-by shooting, leaving his niece without a husband and her two young children fatherless.
At the home, Grey meets and befriends a 17-year old girl, Robyn who lives with Grey's kin but is not related to them or to him. There is an immediate attraction between the 91 year old man and the 17 year old which hints of veering into the sexual but develops into a close friendship and ultimately into a father-daughter type of relationship. Robyn cleans Grey's filthy apartment and brings him a reason for living. At the same time, Grey befriends woman closer to his own age, Shirley Wring.
Much of the story turns on the deepening relationship and trust that develops between Grey and Robyn. As the story proceeds, Grey receives an opportunity to take an untested drug which will restore his memory temporarily at the cost of radically shortening his life. Grey uses the opportunity presented to him, to strengthen his human ties to Robyn and to Shirley, to provide for his family, and to come to terms with his life. As did Coy many years earlier, Grey takes matters into his own hands and is willing to engage in wrongdoing for what he
perceives as a larger sense of justice.
The primary characters, Grey, Robyn, and Coy, are well-developed. As with Mosley's noir novels, the book offers an excellent sense of place and scene, both of Los Angeles and of the Mississippi of Grey's childhood. Some of the individual scenes are highly moving and thoughtful, such as Grey's enigmatic encounter at the age of 7 with a southern minister who learns a difficult lesson from the young African American child. Coy's rather obscure teachings, which Grey keeps in the recesses of his mind, also are intriguing in themselves and play a pivotal role in Grey's late awakening. A moving, well-told story about the power of love and redemption, "Ptolemy Grey" shows that Mosley is far more than a writer of noir.
