Just about finished with Walter Mosley's The Man in My Basement, which is one of the finest, most engrossing pieces of fiction I have read for a long, long time. I don't want to give away any of the plot, but briefly, the story centers around a thirty-something black man named Charles Blakey, who is descended from a line of free blacks reaching back into 17th-century America and who lives alone in the big family house in Sag Harbor. Anniston Bennet is a mysterious white man who approaches Blakey with a strange proposition...to be locked up in Blakey's basement.
The novel, written in adorned prose that allows the ideas to breathe, will hold readers rapt. Apparently Mosley is normally more associated with action and mystery fiction, but this is Mosley's most philosophical novel to date. He explores guilt, punishment, responsibility and redemption as individual and as social constructs. While it will be difficult for this novel to achieve the kind of audience Mosley's genre fiction does, he certainly demonstrates his superior ability to tackle virtually any prose form, and he is to be applauded for creating a rarity, an engaging novel of ideas.
