Walter Mosley appears on our video call in a room bathed in sunshine. Small rectangular abstract prints on the wall behind him glow, and glass and plastic bottles on shelving near the window shimmer.
When I ask where he’s calling from, Mosley says “Santa Monica”—which also happens to be the setting for the opening pages of Ghalen: A Romance in Black, Mosley’s new novel about love and coming-of-age for a Black family in the early 2000s.
Mosley divides his time between New York and California. His bestselling Easy Rawlins hardboiled detective novels are set in Watts, a Black neighborhood of Los Angeles. His Joe King Oliver books feature a Black ex-cop from New York City. Does he need to be in Santa Monica to write his LA characters? Or NYC to write about New York?
“Nope. I write wherever I am. I get up every day and work on whatever I was writing yesterday.”
At 74, Mosley’s been writing novels for four decades, after working as a computer programmer. It is well known that he writes every day of every week, year in and year out. Mosley has also written for television and film. He has not gotten rich from writing, he says, but instead thinks of himself as part of the true middle class, meaning he doesn’t “have to worry about how much money I have at any particular moment.” Ghalen is his 69th book, not including collections he has edited.
“When people ask me ‘How do you find the discipline?’ I tell them, imagine you have a best friend and she tells you that her day is pretty structured and the first thing that happens every morning is that she and her husband have vigorous sex. The one thing you wouldn’t ask her is ‘How do you find the discipline?’! You get it? If it’s something you really love doing, you do it.”
The Mosley productivity corollaries seem to be: Accept what your imagination gives you; keep revising. In this novel, for example, main character Ghalen’s maternal grandfather, Night, appears unexpectedly at his door. For years, the family has believed Night was killed in action in Vietnam, but here he is, ready to be an important part of young Ghalen’s journey.
“I certainly didn’t expect that to happen,” Mosley says, with delight. “It was just fun to have him appear and be in Ghalen’s life.”
“People know different things. I bring a different piece of knowledge to storytelling.”
Or, in another unexpected twist of the author’s imagination, one character shoots another in the head. Mosley says he didn’t know that was going to happen until he wrote it, either. “I went wow, that is interesting. It brought me into such conflict with my agent. She just didn’t believe that a person could survive if they were shot in the brain. I had to prove it to her, right? People know different things. I bring a different piece of knowledge to storytelling.”
The brain injury releases an anger that characters have to accept and try to overcome. Even in a book he calls a romance, Mosley puts the unpredictability of violence beside the more typical unpredictability of love.
Regarding the second Mosley corollary, he says this novel went through 15 or 20 revisions to reach its final form. “In my book This Year You Write Your Novel, I say you don’t even start writing a novel until the first draft is finished. It’s like mining, right? They give you a sledgehammer and they say there’s gold in there, so go down and knock them rocks. So, you pound and pound, and in the dust you begin to see a little sparkle here and there. So you pound and pound some more, and slowly, slowly it gets worked down into gold.”
When he set out to begin Ghalen, Mosley knew at least that he wanted “to write something about love.”
The author looked to the great love stories of the literary canon, noting that in the 19th century, novelists “thought they should write about a king, or a queen, or a pirate, or a general, or a barbarian—top people with great wealth and great power. Then they realized that writing about real people—like Madame Defarge of A Tale of Two Cities knitting in front of her wine shop—could be just as powerful, just as meaningful.” That’s the kind of story that speaks to Mosley: “I wanted to write a romance novel about real people, real Black people, having an experience of love.”
The novel opens with the unexpected meeting of Jamilah Fenestra and Robert Horton at a Santa Monica farmer’s market in 1999, a time when few Black people shopped at the beachside market. Though they’re not royals or pirates, they’re both unusual people. Robert, who’s neurodivergent, works in a vegan restaurant owned by a Belgian chef.
“When I sold the book to Amistad, the first time they called me, they said, ‘So, you’re a vegan, right?’ And I said, ‘No, man, I eat pork chops. And sugar.’ They’re like, ‘Really?’ They were surprised. But I did the research. The recipes are all real. That was really fun. I love cooking. I love making and eating food.”
Jamilah, a UCLA medical student raised by a single mother who has large ambitions for her daughter, is attracted to Robert’s differences: his precise habits, his sweetness and his unusual responses to the world. Robert comes from the wrong side of the tracks and his mother is institutionalized, but Jamilah comes to feel that she “had never experienced physical and definitely not a spiritual closeness with anyone this powerfully.”
On an early date, they wander through an art museum and Robert is transfixed by a painting “of gnarled trees in front of a row of low-slung buildings.” He stands rooted before the painting, getting close enough to it to provoke a harsh warning from a security guard. Robert won’t be hurried and refuses to move along until he has resolved the mystery of the painting. Jamilah spends the next two hours continuing through the museum and when she returns to Robert, still in front of the painting, she’s amazed by what he has discovered.
“I was trying to understand how his difference expands the world, rather than limits him,” Mosley says. “Jamilah sees every painting in the place, reads everything about them, but Robert was getting more out of the visit. This is really important to me, to know that I can gain traction by understanding how somebody else looks at and experiences the world. Whether they are smarter or less intelligent than you doesn’t matter. . . . If you understand that, your world becomes larger.”
“Great novels, like Gogol’s Dead Souls, have these moments where the main character sees two peasants in the field and in maybe three sentences you understand almost everything about their lives. That’s my goal. I want you to understand every character that you come across.”
The product of Jamilah and Robert’s unexpected union is Ghalen, whose adventures and travails as he grows toward manhood are the focus of most of the novel. Like his parents, Ghalen is whip-smart and a bit odd. He carries a deep sense of responsibility for his somewhat vulnerable father. He spends his free hours in the kitchens where Robert works, develops deep childhood friendships that complicate his entry into adulthood, attends the University of California, Berkeley, and takes a road trip that eventually brings important change to his life, though he must first spend time in prison because he will not betray a friend.
“Rather than being defeated by it,” Mosley observes of Ghalen’s prison experience, “he decides he’s not going to just take it. And that’s because he’s a hero.”
But Mosley won’t say much about his hero, apparently leaving judgments about Ghalen’s actions to his readers. Instead, he talks about the minor characters in the novel, the dishwashers and waiters, the chef, the drivers, the hitchhikers Ghalen meets on his road trip.
“I love those guys. I love their stories, their way of living, their way of thinking. Great novels, like Gogol’s Dead Souls, have these moments where the main character sees two peasants in the field and in maybe three sentences you understand almost everything about their lives. That’s my goal. I want you to understand every character that you come across.”
But what about the hero, Ghalen? Toward the end, he has seemingly freed himself from limiting obligations and maybe found enduring love. But much is unresolved, he is not quite at rest.
“He’s what, 20 at the most?” Mosley exclaims. “He’s still learning to individuate. . . . He’s still figuring it out. Besides, life is always changing, always incomplete.”
Does that mean we will see more of Ghalen?
Mosley takes a moment to consider. “I write a lot of one-off novels, I’ve written a dozen I think. I just write them and move on. But this one was fun, so much fun. My Hollywood head always says, oh, look, can we have a sequel? I am happy with this book just as it is. But this one, I could . . . I could write it, you know?”
Sounds like a definite maybe.
Read our review of Ghalen.
Photo of Walter Mosley by Marcia Wilson.
