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A comforting world view, somehow
Book Review
By Derryll White
Mosley, Walter (2025). Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right.
“The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.” – Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley has been consistent, through many books, in putting family first. There is a flavour to this that is comforting… pistachio maybe. The novel presents family as a cultural thing. Something many of us are removed from in our spread out, disposable 21st century world. King Oliver calls it out consistently through this novel – respect, duty to all those who have both gone before and presently with him. Somehow it is a comforting world view.
Walter Mosley’s central characters are always black and embedded in a culture that most of his readers know little of. But there is always a sense of love of life that shines through, and an honour that most of us aspire to.
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Excerpts from the novel:
IDENTITY – My middle name is King. My father named me that as an honor to both me and my namesake, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong’s mentor. Dad loved jazz, thought that it was what distinguished Black identity in America and the world.
LOVE – Love cannot survive without the object of its passion. Love is not a citizen among equals. Love can not escape, cannot switch loyalty, cannot exist without its yang. And, in my experience, a woman truly in love with her mate cannot be disabused of her commitments. Like a river, love must run its course, and if it is true love in the heart of the woman being questioned, then that truth will keep its own counsel.
FAMILY – I remembered that parental speech on my drive out to the airport. Once again it came to me how much of my life was dictated by the lessons my father dubbed me with. He wasn’t my enemy or even my friend but more like the ground under my feet, the air I breathed, and the water I drank. That was my father.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
