Customer Reviews

Diablerie: A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Compact, concise, compelling. Dark. Walter Mosley has crafted a brief novel, an exploration of the human psyche that grips the reader with the opening page.

We know the protagonist's name. It is Ben Dibbuk, he's an almost 50-year-old computer programmer, married with a daughter in college. He has Svetlana, a Russian mistress his daughter's age. Nonetheless, exactly who is Ben Dibbuk? He's alienated, unable to care for anyone or anything. Nothing matters to him - not his wife, Mona, his daughter, Seela, or his work. He simply would like to be left alone.

Earlier he had suffered from frightening nightmares and went into therapy at the behest of Mona. The terrifying dreams stopped after awhile as did his visits to the therapist. One day Mona insists that he go to a banquet with her, an evening with her co-workers at a fashion magazine, Diablerie. It is there that he's approached by the keynote speaker, Star, a woman who claims to know him. He has no recollection whatsoever of her. When she tells him the exact date they were together, he replies, "That's back when I was still drinking......I was just telling the waitress there that I've forgotten more nights than I remember."

That same evening he is introduced to Harvard Rollins, a fact-checker for the magazine, and as he later learns his wife's lover, the man she has asked to look into Ben's past. Why?

At this point for whatever reason he feels compelled to get in touch with his mother, a woman he hasn't seen in 15 years. Just before Ben hung up he heard his mother say, "...I never thought I'd feel that I regretted my own son's birth but-"

He also places a telephone call to his brother, Briggs, who is now in jail. Briggs remembers another phone call from Ben some 20 years earlier in which Ben asked questions about criminal apprehension, mentioned something wrong that he had done, and that there had been a witness - a woman by the name of Star.

Moseley is a master of prose. Who else would describe an alcoholic's desire for cognac as "...rich amber liquor moving through my veins like chamber music on a sunny afternoon in a many-windowed room in July"?

He's also a master at creating an intriguing mystery, one that is irresistible to readers and grows deeper as the narrative moves on. Daring, adventurous, powerful, Moseley is all of these as he proves once again in the hauntingly erotic Diablerie.

- Gail Cooke

To be honest I was a little wary about getting this book because I saw the ratings. However, Walter Mosley is a favorite of mine and I wanted to see for myself. I REALLY liked this book. I think the problem that a lot of people are having is comparing this work to his Easy Rawlins series. I've (mistakenly) done it with other authors and people are doing it with this one. You CAN'T compare the two. When you read this book the worst thing you can do is compare it with his other stuff.

Easy Rawlins, Fearless Jones are icons that make literature fun and make literature timeless. But Mosley is too talented to be limited to that. Diablerie was a novel that compltely messes with your mind and pulls you in the mind of a regular man with some serious problems. It's a very, very short book which actually adds to the story. This is a cross beteween a mystery, psychological thriller, erotica, and just plain good ole fiction!

I really enjoyed 'Killing Johnny Frey'and I enjoyed 'Diablerie'. I like how Mosley "steps out" and does something unconventional. I, for one, hope he continues on this path. I'll always love and enjoy Easy, Mouse, Jesus, and Bonnie but a talented author like Mosley probably needs to push the envelope to keep his mind and imagination sharp.

The great mystery novelist Lawrence Block once told me that he could write a cookbook at that point in his career and it would be shelved with the mysteries in bookstores. Such is the peril of being stereotyped as an author.

Walter Mosley could have faced a similar fate. As the author of the bestselling Easy Rawlins series, he is a "name" mystery writer. But he has worked hard and prolifically over the years to branch out into other genres, such as literary novels, science fiction and nonfiction. Last year he wrote KILLING JOHNNY FRY, which was sexually frank or, in Mosley's words, a "sexistential noir."

Now Mosley has penned DIABLERIE, which echoes some of the themes of Johnny Fry to once again paint a devastating portrait of an ordinary man in extraordinary crisis. DIABLERIE cements Mosley's reputation as one of our best writers of modern noir.

On the surface, Ben Dibbuk is an American success story. He is a 47-year-old computer troubleshooter for a huge New York City bank. Married for 23 years to an upwardly mobile wife, they raised a daughter now in college. And he created this comfortable life by overcoming his own personal demons. Once a blackout drinker and rambler in the years before his marriage, he has been clean and sober for over two decades.

But if there is one rule of noir, it is this: nothing is what it appears to be on the surface. Beneath the surface, Ben is emotionally dead. He describes his feelings when his daughter smiles at him: "While she beamed at me, the feeling that lurked in my shoulder blades took over. Not an emotion or something physical like pain or heat or cold, it was more akin to a void, a sensual numbness."

Ben's relationship with his wife, Mona, is in a freefall. He says, "We just wrangled, disputed over anything: Seela's future, our sex routines, what life had or had not brought to either or us." So Ben now pays the rent and bills of a much younger, Russian college "student" (perhaps mistress, perhaps hooker). Svetlana is on call 24/7 to have sex with Ben.

But even wild sex with a woman half his age doesn't work for Ben anymore. "`I don't hate anybody.' I said, thinking, nor do I love or fear or worry about anyone." Ben's entire existence is about keeping control. "The idea of me, Ben Dibbuk, losing control, even for a moment, was ridiculous."

Then his life of quiet desperation is thrown into chaos when a lady apparently from his past walks up to him at a business dinner he is forced to attend by his wife, a magazine editor. The mystery woman seems to know him, but Ben has no recollection of her. What's worse is when she appears again a few days later at his office, demanding to know why he wants to "hurt" her.

His drinking days are a "shadow," which "contained a mountain." Ben then finds that his wife not only has taken a lover, but is having him investigated by a detective. Why? What crime might he have committed with this mystery woman? Ben says, "I was beginning to feel fear...What was happening to me? Why was my past, a past that held nothing but a few drunken benders, coming back?"

Soon, cops from Colorado ask Ben to come in for questioning about a murder that happened 20 years before, of which he has no knowledge. Like the Edmond O'Brien character in the great film noir DOA, Ben has entered the perpetual noir night. He thinks, "Darkness was up ahead, I knew. Death and demolition were my destination, if not my destiny --- that is what I felt. But I didn't care. The void in my shoulders protected me from the fear." He won't be going into work at the bank anytime soon. And he starts smoking again. For the first time, Ben is forced to face the truth, not only about his drinking days, but about his parents and his brother in prison, and the possibility of true love and redemption in life.

Mosley has once again written a great book that will keep you turning pages right until the end. Faulkner once said that "the problem with the past is that it is never past." And that is certainly the theme here. But Mosley's brilliance is that he writes about a world in which comfort and security is an illusion. Any day can bring a wrong turn on the road at the exact wrong moment, a voice from the buried past on the phone or the spot on the CAT scan that might throw us into the noir night.

Mosley writes, "Life for all Americans, whether they knew it or not, was like playing blackjack against the house --- sooner or later you were going to lose...The winners were my bosses' bosses' bosses. They lived in the Alps or Palm Springs or somewhere else where the earth is run from...Black people in prison, Iraqis blown up on job lines in Baghdad or Vietnamese peasants in their rice paddies becoming target practice for passing American helicopters --- we were all dealt a losing hand."

And that is why DIABLERIE is even scarier than the mysteries for which Mosley is famous. Here, he has written a novel about real people with real weaknesses and vulnerabilities who miscalculate when everything is on the line. Ben Dibbuk could be any one of us on a really, really bad day.

--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan

I'm always willing to give Mosley the benefit of the doubt when he releases a poorly received novel. I even gave "Killing Johnny Fry" a good review. But this time he really dropped the ball and has offered up such an empty, uninteresting excuse for a novel that I have to wonder if this isn't some sort of practical joke or an experiment to see just how much chaff his fans can tolerate before something finally has to give.

Thankfully I got it from the library and didn't pay the $24 retail price (which is another slap in the face considering not only the book's poor quality but also it's paltry length). I found myself wanting to put it down several times but I toughed it out, thinking "It's only 180 pages, maybe the ending will be worth it." But it wasn't. The so-called climax doesn't even justify the few hours spent getting to it.

The story, a quasi-mystery involving a family man who may or may not have committed a murder during an alcoholic blackout some years before, had the potential to work on a few different levels but pretty much fails on all of them. As a character study, I found myself not interested in the protagonist and not caring one way or the other what his fate would be. As a mystery, the crime he might have committed was pedestrian and the story's final resolution of this conflict was anti-climactic to say the least. There's also a dose of sexual tension as our hero engages in carnal adventures with his wife and mistress. These scenes are lame, as if Mosley had already exhausted all his good erotic ideas while putting together "Killing Johnny Fry" and just stuffed the remainders in this volume to fill it out.

There's a lot of prose throughout "Diablerie" that describes the protagonist as an empty shell; a blank, unfeeling, passionless man jarred back to life by unexpected circumstances. In one sense the book succeeds by being empty, unfeeling and passionless just like its hero. Perhaps that's what Mosley was going for. Unfortunately, the story never wakes up and in the end is a complete waste of time.

"Diablerie" is a major let-down and probably should have stayed in the back of Mosley's filing cabinet and never been unleashed onto the public. He really owes us a good one after this.

This story reminded me a lot of 'Killing Johny Fry'. Overall it was a mediocre long story that may have been a great short one. Ben Dibbuk is a married computer programmer who lives a very predictable life. One day after a chance encounter with a mysterious woman name Star his life starts to change dramatically. At home he thinks that his life has no purpose and he is filled with a dread he cannot name or identify. At work he is unfulfilled. He does know understand his mistress' real intention for staying involved with him. As the story progresses he realizes that Star has begun to implicate him in a 25 year old murder. A murder that an innocent man was convicted of and died while serving the rest of his life in prison. Ben never really takes control of all the events surrounding him. He just sort of bounces from one emotion or lack thereof to the next without understanding why he is the way he is. With the help of an associate who has ties to an elite national security outfit he tries to find out if he is a murderer or not. My expectations were very high as I was hoping that this novel would top 'Killing Johnny Fry' and signal that Moseley is still the best. He is still the best but this is by far the most boring novel of his I have ever read. The story moves along at a snails pace and then the part of the story that the reader hangs in there for is a simple revelation type explanation neatly summed up in the last three or four pages of the book.

Most of the negative reviews here have naturally focused on the primary story line of the main character (did he or didn't he?). Perhaps the deeper and more interesting aspect of the book is a bit beneath the surface. The sub-plot chronicling Ben's emotional life with his chronic detachment from everyone in his life is, in my opinion, the more interesting and entertaining aspect of the novel. While this is a different kind of Mosley read, to be sure, it is still a good one.

I love Walter Mosley novels, but not this one. It was awful. There was just page after page of boring writing occassionaly interrupted by pages of boring trashy sex descriptions. The plot didn't make sense at all and was just ridiculous. The only good thing about the book to me was that it is very short, so you don't waste a lot of your time with it.

This story just didn't do it for me. It wasn't exciting and the plot was so simple and plain and I hate to say this but it was kinda boring. Benny character was developed and I connected with him, but that's it. I didn't walk away from this story with that "OH WOW" feeling. That Star lady almost made the story get juicy but . . . well she didn't. I love Walter Mosley work; however, this will not be one of my favorites.
It was a quick read, and I was anxious to see what happened next but when it did happen I was like, "that's it?"

I think this should have just been one part of a novella. . . and I do recommend it if you need something simple, mellow, and quick to read.

Ben Dibbuk is a middle aged computer programmer with a loveless marriage, a daughter in college he barely knows, and a young Russian mistress. He has reached some sort of peace with his inner demons and is content to live life without much feeling when something really strange happens. A woman appears in his life who claims to be from his past. Who claims that he murdered someone, many years before, in a drunken rage that he cannot remember. Who is planning to turn him in to the police.

At this point Ben's life begins to disintegrate, and most of the story is a slow, chilling, haunted portrayal of his tailspin. Ben really doesn't know if he might have killed someone or not; doesn't know if he will be spending the rest of his life in prison. Watches as his marriage disintegrates. Tries therapy with an obtuse if unconventional therapist. Tries to comfort himself with sex, but it doesn't work.

Walter Mosley is a brilliant writer, and does this as well as he does everything else. I enjoyed reading it, but when I was finished I felt dissatisfied. The story never made much sense. The characters were not believable. The ending was contrived. The motivations of the characters were hard to figure out.

What can I say? If you like Mosley, you'll like this one, too. I enjoyed it, but it's not his best work. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

Walter Mosley Meets Andrew Vachss: If Pit Bull Terriers Could Talk
Here is the moment in this novel to which I will return, again and again, to study and learn: the lie detector test. "Diablerie" 's narrator has been arrested as a murder suspect, and is strapped up to a lie detector in a room full of officers, lawyers, and professionals. The results of this test will go a long way toward deciding whether or not the suspect will end up serving hard time. It is a moment of the highest drama. And, in accordance with Mosley's unblinking, unflinching focus on trauma survivors, this pivotal moment receives a description as clinical as a spinal tap. The last time I read something like this, the name on the book was not Walter Mosley, but Andrew Vachss, champion of victims of childhood sexual abuse, and dog lover, particularly fond of mastiffs and pit bull terriers. The prose is pared down, except in brief memorable passages like that in which the narrator, an abstinent alcoholic, longs for a glass of brandy. The reading of this bare-bones prose, like the point of view experienced by its protagonist, is an ordeal to be endured, an exercise in stoicism. And the reader for whom this novel will be most meaningful is the reader familiar with -- or even with professional expertise in -- the rehabilitation of humans or animals born and bred as objects of abuse and violence.
Much is presumed of the reader of Diablerie, and Mosley, already an eminent and influential writer, has raised the bar very high. He writes as though he wants actual trauma survivors, with first-hand knowledge of dissociation and the professional therapy necessary to change dissociation, to believe that the protagonist is one of them. Diablerie has received much negative press from professional critics and book lovers, and these responses speak for many other people who will face the tests and trials of this novel, and find themselves unprepared for its rigors.
The day is coming, sooner or later, when Diablerie will command the respect that it is due. Personally I like to imagine the creators and actors of The Wire (HBO) plunging into the riptide of currents in this novel, and presenting a filmed version, with visual images that fill out the echoing resonant silences in Walter Mosley's narrative. Done properly, such a film could bring Academy Award nominations to its participants. For, to the reading public at large, it would take a really great motion picture to make this terse novel a comprehensible experience. No, this is not Mosley's most accessible or best-loved book, nor does it need to be. If anyone cherishes Diablerie -- and some of us do -- it will be those of us who have looked at photographs of the pit bull terriers seized from Michael Vick, those who were spared euthanasia and surrendered to an animal sanctuary for rehabilitation, some court-ordered to remain their for life, -- those who have looked at the canine eyes in these photographs, round, gleaming, pregnant with unexpressed feeling, and wondered what the pit bull terriers would tell us, if only they could talk.