I was a bit less enthusiastic than Vicki about this, as the
below review suggests
John
Killing Johnny Fry - Walter Mosley
Misgivings about Walter Mosley's new book start with the
subtitle, 'a sexistential novel'. It's all too redolent of
the early sixties, a long-lost era when poets with comb-overs
wrote erotic fiction for Grove or Olympia and tried to seduce
any young female in a fifty yard radius. Still, it does at
least warn the reader that what lurks between the covers is
not another LA-set crime story featuring Easy Rawlins or
Fearless Jones, Mosley's two regular protagonists. No, this
is a novel whose subject is sexual desire, and one which is
more than happy to plunge into the outright pornographic in
making its point.
Not since Nicholson Baker's Vox, a decade or so ago, has a
critically regarded novelist written anything as outright
filthy as Killing Johnny Fry. It starts with its hero, a
black man called Cordell Carmel, walking in on his
girlfriend, Joelle (also black) as she's being ecstatically
buggered by a white man called Johnny Fry, who is mostly
remarkable for this size of his dick (apologies, but it would
be absurd to go for the genteel euphemism in a review of a
book like this).
Cordell initially just watches and leaves. He doesn't
confront the lovers, but nonetheless his life is entirely
changed. He feels that this revelation has woken him up from
a life he's been sleepwalking through, accepting his once a
week missionary position sex as all life can offer. Now he
knows different. Over the next week, he quits his
(mysteriously well paid) job as a translator and concentrates
on investigating his very own sexual heart of darkness. This
involves his having hot revenge sex with Joelle, more hot sex
with a cute young photographer, and even hotter sex with his
upstairs neighbour. All this is described in lascivious
detail and is mostly pretty sexy, though, for this reader at
least, a little heavy on the analingus.
The first half of the novel also sees Mosley doing a decent
job of evoking the pains and excitements involved in
discovering a lover's infidelity. At this point Killing
Johnny Fry is shaping up as an
(in)decent slice of pornographic urban noir, somewhat in the
vein of Elizabeth McNeil's Nine and a Half Weeks (a much
better book than film), with just a hint of the sexual angst
so powerfully evoked in another book by a black Los Angeleno,
Charles Mingus' autobiography Beneath The Underdog.
Unfortunately the second half drifts into an unconvincing
fantasy which sees Cornell meeting a mysterious black porn
star called Sisypha (one can only imagine how thrilled Camus
would have been at the tip of the hat) who drugs him, then
leads him through a rather over familiar Manhattan underworld
of bizarre sex fetish clubs. The effect is a little like
someone relating the contents of an erotic dream they've had
and would like to make sense of (there was this kind of sex
clown and then I was in this boxing match….) Interesting
perhaps to a therapist or a lover, but for the regular reader
there is both too much information and not enough.
As a result any identification one had built up with
Cordell's predicament starts to evaporate. And, by the time
he emerges from this dream to attempt some kind of closure in
his various relationships, I had lost interest. In the final
analysis it's hard not to see Killing Johny Fry as frankly a
bit of a wank, a public display of material - albeit
interesting, even important, material - that its author has
yet to fully work through.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 18 Nov 2007 EST