RL's Dream - Hardcover

Mosley, Walter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393038025 ISBN 13: 9780393038026

Publisher: W. W. Norton, 1995

Synopsis

When a black musician in New York is evicted for non-payment of rent, a white woman living in the same apartment block takes him in. He is Soupspoon Wise, a gentle jazz guitarist from Mississippi who has cancer. She is Kiki Waters, a drinking, swearing redhead from Arkansas who works on Wall Street. The novel traces their ménage.

RL’s Dream is a novel about the blues―as an expression of black poetry and black tragedy and how they sit in judgment on the American experience. In contemporary New York, aging bluesman Soupspoon Wise is alone, ill, and dying. He has played his music in a thousand bars, clubs, and juke joints, but never so memorably as the time he played with one Robert “RL” Johnson in the Mississippi delta. That brief, indelible encounter with the great genius of country blues haunts Soupspoon, much as Johnson himself is said to have been possessed by Satan. And so Soupspoon proceeds to tell his story to Kiki Waters, the young white woman who has taken him in, another refugee from a South she can neither deny nor escape.

About this title

About the Author:

Walter Mosley is the author of four previous mystery novels in the Easy Rawlins series: Devil in a Blue Dress (basis for the acclaimed film starring Denzel Washington), A Red Death, White Butterfly, and Black Betty, a New York Times bestseller. In August 1995 he published his first non-genre novel, RL's Dream, to widespread praise. Mosley is the current president of the Mystery Writers of America, a member of the executive board of the PEN American Center and founder of its Open Book Committee, and is on the board of directors of the National Book Awards. His novels are now published in eighteen countries. He is at work on a book featuring a new character, a philosophical and tough ex-convict named Socrates Fortlow; sections have already appeared in Esquire and GQ. A native of Los Angeles, Mosley lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly:

After four increasingly well-received crime novels starring Los Angeles PI Easy Rawlins, Mosley has moved strongly ahead to a more searching and deeply felt style and subject. He writes here of Atwater "Soupspoon" Wise, a battered, failing relic of a man who once played backup to legendary Delta jazz guitarist Robert "RL" Johnson and who is now barely surviving on New York's Lower East Side. When we meet him, Soupspoon, who has cancer, is being evicted from his tiny apartment. Enter Kiki Waters, a hard-drinking, profane redhead who fled a life of horror and incest in Arkansas and now ekes out an uneasy living at a Wall Street insurance firm. With her tough street smarts, she stops the eviction cold, uses her office know-how to fake lavish health insurance for Soupspoon and moves him in with her. They cling together, these two outcasts from hard times, Soupspoon with a gentleness born of deep resignation, Kiki with a protective desperation fueled by booze and rage. Gradually, Soupspoon's life begins to mend: someone he knew as a kid in the South offers him a gig at his after-hours drinking place; a pretty young girl is drawn to his sweetness. But for Kiki, the only way out is through violence and flight. Mosley has always been a vivid writer, but here his work achieves a constant level of dark poetry: he flawlessly integrates Soupspoon's and Kiki's past harsh lives and memories with the keenly observed contemporary New York slum scene as the bittersweet blues constantly sound somber chords beneath. There is no false sentimental note anywhere in the book, just a deeply moving creation of two extraordinary people who achieve a powerful humanity where it would seem almost impossible it should exist. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0393038025
• ISBN 13: 9780393038026
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272