4-25-08, 12:26 pm

A Father's Law By Richard Wright New York, Harper Perennial, 2008.

Diablerie By Walter Mosley New York, Bloomsbury, 2008.

By Clara West


Shortly after Richard Wright's passing in 1960, Julia Wright found hidden in her father's papers the manuscript for A Father's Law, the last unfinished novel by the iconic American novelist. According to her introduction to the newly published book celebrating the centennial of Wright's birth, Julia Wright sees the manuscript as speaking across the generations in a deeply personal way, but also directly to the social ills of yesterday and today.

Wright's last work records the investigation of Chief Ruddy Turner into a series of slayings in an affluent Chicago suburb. Similar to several of Wright's novels, A Father's Law opens with the the central character awakened by the shrill sound of the telephone. Turner, an African American police captain with 25 years on the force and preparing to retire, is called mysteriously into the office by the city police commissioner.

Turner is a man of the law. He sets his watch by it. The pistol he carries and the uniform he wears has a magical power of erasing the social stigma of his race. A quick touch of the pistol, in fact, will chase away his recurring sense of powerlessness.

Turner is promoted from captain to chief of police of the suburb. He is ordered to uncover the perpetrators of a series of brutal murders that have the community in an uproar. Turner's experience as an efficient detective suit him for the task, his superiors tell him.

Meanwhile, his personal life is in a shambles. He hasn't been able to talk to his son for years. Tommy Turner is a quiet, intelligent college student whose ideas about crime and society unnerve is father. Tommy is studying sociology and looks for social explanations for the existence of crime, while his father is adamant that illegal behavior should simply be tracked down and punished regardless of mitigating circumstances.

Still, Ruddy Turner can't shake the feeling that his son is involved in suspicious activities. After years of experience with guilty criminals and how they act under a police grilling, Ruddy suspects something is behind his son's late nights and stand-offishness.

In the end, Turner comes to question the objectivity and neutrality of the law. Events lead Turner to challenge his own rigid moral code and make steps toward understanding what might drive some people to disregard the law he upholds unquestioningly.

Wright's last book is rough. Many of the details don't jibe, and there is some repetition that would have been fixed certainly if he had not passed away before completing the project. Still, the book is worth the read both as a story and as an historical document on the final creative efforts of one of America's most treasured authors.

Sharing similar themes with Wright, Walter Mosley, in his latest psychological/crime thriller, Diablerie, explores the internal life of Ben Dibbuk, a man without a past. Repressed memory syndrome may be a controversial subject in real life, but here it is the stuff of great fiction.

Dibbuk is a middle-aged African American computer programmer (a real life passion of Mosley's) for a large New York bank. But when he runs into a white woman named 'Star' who claims to know him, his entire life turns upside down. The forgotten past comes back to haunt him.

Relations with his wife are strained. After 22 years of marriage, Mona, a freelance editor for a new magazine, seems distant. Ben realizes that he has difficulty feeling any emotion for her or for their daughter, and he isn't sure why or what to do to overcome it. It is a vast emotional emptiness that he seems to bear physically on his back like a burden.

One day, Ben suspects his wife's claim that she is visiting her sick mother isn't completely honest. So he walks over to his mother-in-law's apartment where, while hiding in a closet, he secretly catches his wife in an affair with a co-worker. After the two lovers finish, Ben hears his wife ask the man, who happens to be a former police officer, about the progress of his investigation into Ben's background. (Warning: many scenes in this novel, such as this one, are explicit and geared toward an adult audience.)

As you might expect these revelations send Ben over the edge. Simultaneously discovering one's wife is cheating and that she has asked her boyfriend to look into one's past would probably be too much for most people.

Suddenly, an array of powerful people and institutions are interested in Ben Dibbuk, who had up to now been an anonymous computer programmer, even at his own place of work. They are digging into his past, asking questions about his involvement in an unsolved murder. But it is a past he knows nothing about. Could he have been involved? Do his nightmares reveal the hidden truths about a violent past he has covered up? Is this blank in his memory somehow linked to his lack of an emotional bond with his family?

This novel draws deeply on the noir tradition that invokes the individual's confrontation with overwhelmingly powerful social forces and agents. Survival and redemption depend on maneuvering – often, as in this case, with the aid of equally marginalized allies and friends – through a landscape designed to capture the suspected renegade or outsider. It is also about resistance to the abuse of power.

For example, in one illuminating scene, Ben is meeting a friend, Cassius, who may be his only ally in this confusion, at a local restaurant. The restaurant owner is physically enormous, wealthy, and powerful former member of the military intelligence community named Joey. Joey, who is old friends with Cassius, asks the hostess to seat the two men in a private dining room and to bring them anything they want. The waitress responds, 'As you say.'

For Ben this moment reveals to him the secret of power. The hostess' words, to Ben's mind, 'seemed to imbue the restaurant owner with great power. It struck me,' Ben thinks, 'as odd that the one obeying was also the person who articulated the degree of Joey's influence. This seemed very important to me at the time.'

Mosley is hinting that while the employee's obedience and consent to authority expresses and the greatness of Joey's power, it also signifies the limits of that power. Afterall, what would Joey be without an obedient employee? To my mind, this is one of the most brilliant dramatizations of social relations put out by an American novelist in a long time.

Both Wright and Mosley have produced tremendously powerful novels whose key themes challenge unthinking acceptance of power and law. Because Wright anticipates Mosley by almost 50 years, it is wonderful to see such an important tradition in American letters being maintained so skillfully and creatively.