I noticed this book on display while I was browsing at a bookstore near my apartment, which happens to be a basement apartment. When I say ‘on display’, I mean that there was an index card affixed to the shelf under the book that designated it as the book of the month for the mystery book club, which would meet in a couple of weeks to discuss it. Because the cover image was sort of interesting, because the premise of the story, judging from the back cover’s précis, reminded me a little of Kafka’s ‘The Hunger Artist’ (in spite of the fact that it seemed as though it had been specifically written to inspire that association), because going to a book club seemed like a good, social thing to do, and because I had just received my tax return and could afford to buy a book without agonizing over it, I bought it.The premise is that a pretty wealthy and mysterious ‘short white man’ offers a black man an exorbitant amount of money to rent out his, the black guy’s, basement. But he wants to stay in the basement in a cage, as a prisoner. It’s a little bit unbelievable, maybe very unbelievable, but if you can accept that premise, there’s a good deal of tension early on and towards the middle of the book, as you anticipate finding out what this guy’s motives could possibly be. Structuring the book this way, however, seemed to me to put a lot of pressure on the scene or scenes, which had to happen, where these two guys were going to sit down in the basement and have stark, philosophical, merciless conversations. Which I was looking forward to. Unfortunately, the guy’s motives turn out to be pretty abstract and lame (both, somehow), and I found the second half of the book pretty boring. I guess he is supposed to be an embodiment of the complacency in all of us, of our complicity with evil, but if that’s the case Mosley probably would have been better served by creating a character that seemed even remotely human. And other authors have done this sort of thing more interestingly and specifically, and without having to resort to ridiculous premises. If you would like a great variation on this theme, for example, try Camus’s The Fall. The dynamic between the two guys plays out more or less like the Zimbardo prison experiment, but there is another dynamic that exists between them that I couldn’t help but notice and wonder about. The guy in the basement will say something, for example, like ‘you…you’re not going to leave me down here in the dark with only bread and water for four days…are you?’, and the other guy will say, ‘well, I hadn’t planned to, but now that you mention it that’s a good idea.’ From which the guy in the basement clearly takes, uh, a certain kind of pleasure, which is described more than once. The physiological manifestation of that pleasure, I mean. I am not the kind of person who looks for sexuality in every aspect of a book, but this theme was kind of difficult not to notice, and I’m not sure what its significance was.
Walter Mosley was one of the keynote authors at last week's NCIBA conference for independent book stores. I grabbed this book because I wanted to read something by him before the conference. Wow - what an amazing author! Although Mosley is best known as a creator of the Easy Rawlins mystery series, a story like The Man in My Basement really falls into the literary fiction category. We tend to judge mystery authors differently than other authors. Usually, we're looking for a good plot with lots of twists and believable characters. But we forgive our mystery authors if the writing style is lacking or even formulaic. Well, there is no need to forgive Mr. Mosley. His writing style is tight and descriptive, with each word carefully chosen and placed.The title character of this book is Charles Blakey. At age 33, Charles has failed at everything in life. He is unemployed and blacklisted in the town because he was suspected of stealing money from the bank he worked at. He lives in his family home, but is at risk of losing it because he can't keep up with the payments. It seems like he has little hope left, when a white stranger, Anniston Bennet offers Blakey $50,000 if he can live in his basement for several weeks. Although Blakey is suspicious of this odd request, he is desperate for the money and accepts the offer. Bennet moves into Blakey's basement and Blakey assumes the strange role of warden as Bennet voluntarily imprisons himself in the basement. The book covers several complex themes of ancestry, crime, punishment, and ultimately redemption. Definitely a complicated book that will stay with me for awhile.
What do You think about The Man In My Basement (2005)?
Walter Mosley is one of my favorite writers. Most know him as a noir/detective story writer. The Man in My Basement is a departure from that. It is in fact a mystery, but not in the traditional sense. Rather than trying to solve a murder or some other crime, the reader is left to decipher the motives of an elderly well-to-do white man who shows up at the doorstep of a down-on-his-luck black man and asks to rent out the man's basement for the purpose of being imprisoned. This is an eerie story that poses questions about race, class, privilege, morality, and--in a sense--the American Dream. Mosley never answers any of these questions for us. Nor does he provide a clean-cut ending or a spiritual awakening by any of the characters.
—Justin S
This is the first Mosely I've read, and I'm curious how it compares to other things he's written.I hate to label it disappointing, but it was. Part of that stems from how it was not at all what I expected. (That in itself is a hazard of reading, and I shrug my shoulders at it.) However, I was expecting a psychological thriller, and I got an extended series of philosophical questions about the nature of evil, necessity, action, and humanity. I haven't the least problem with exploring these ideas and ideals, but I prefer philosophical issues to be worked out with and through narrative proper -- through action and re-action -- rather than one-level parable....separate from that, I did think the prose was weak. I often overlook middling prose when the narrative is engaging, but it was difficult here.
—c w
(The following is less a review and more of an essay).Which came first, civilization or inequality? At the risk of sounding like a pundit, I’d like humbly suggest that the conservative point of view is: civilization requires inequality. There needs to be a class system, a hierarchy which creates a scaffold on which civilization is maintained. And because this is intrinsically unfair, all kinds of (irrational) justifications are used to maintain these hierarchies, and the most pervasive of this is race.It’s not a point of view I agree with, by the way, but it does bolster, for me, something I saw recently: “The system isn’t broken; it was built this way.” But who are the custodians of this system? It can’t be the idealists who rule from the top, and certainly can’t be the workers who slave at the bottom. Then who?It’s the evil men who know this is how things works, and know that they must do bad things to good people to keep worse things from happening to everyone. However, the real problem is, these are human beings too, and unless they find sadistic glee in their work, they, too, will be overcome with existential angst.Is there an out via self-punishment? That’s what we explore in The Man in My Basement. Can a man punish himself for the evil he must perpetrate? On the one hand, to do so he must become Christ-like. But how can someone who robs, rapes, and murders be even remotely Christ-like? And, as Camus points out in Sisyphus, once a person has accepted his punishment, it is no longer punishment—how can one willfully punish oneself without accepting it?The only way, then, to truly punish oneself is submit to the very chaos that so-called civilization is supposed to protect us from. The Man in My Basement allows himself to be locked up, then goads his jailor for the purpose of giving up all control. And it works.Except that the crime for which the man is punishing himself is not the robbery, rape, and murder of his fellow humans—no, his crime was the moment of compassion he displayed, which had the potential of destroying the systems that keep civilization erect. That moment of compassion, that succumbing to angst, was the real crime, which, if allowed to go unpunished, would have rendered all the other sacrifices pointless.This is what I got out of reading Walter Mosley’s book. The Man in My Basement emancipates the main character not by freeing him from the history of slavery, but by freeing him from the purposelessness of his existence. By giving him a duty, as jailor, making him a willfull participant in the very civilization that required slavery in the first place, he allows him to accept his place, and by accepting it, he is no longer punished for his existence.And I am still struggling with the irony of “making him a willful participant”
—Jason Edwards
