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The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

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`Last Days' is the story of a ninety-one year old Black man named Ptolemy. He has dementia... of sorts. I'm sure most doctors would diagnose him as that, but I'm not as convinced. Seems to me this man had more life in his "last days" than most people do their seventy-one point seven years on this planet. Walter Mosley creates a beautiful story with some... provoking people. Ptolemy is a walking, dying encyclopedia of his Black experience. And many others as well. The man is dying, he knows he's dying, and he's OK with him dying. What hurts him most is that his mind is going away. His remaining family is like the rest of ours; some good, some bad, looking for a quick come up.

What happens, however, is what makes Walter Mosley one of the masters of this beloved craft. A mahogany colored beauty (Robyn) finds her way into the life of Ptolemy and she is one of the few bright lights to walk hand and hand with him in the end. While Robyn is his chaperone in "real life", the person that guides him is someone we never really meet. Leave it to Mr. Mosley to create a (ghost) character that is more powerful than the (live) characters. Coydog McCann is the character of whom I speak. He's a teacher, he's a guide, he's a mentor, and he's a friend. Together, Ptolemy and Coydog have a deep, deep friendship that borders on the strongest type of brotherly love. This bond grows stronger over the years and Coy needs Ptolemy to help him complete a mission of sorts when he dies, and Ptolemy needs Robyn to do the same.

To help with this Ptolemy chooses to be a guinea pig for an experimental drug that will help him be lucid his final days. In spite of his dementia, this man is far from crazy and the drug doesn't GIVE him clarity... it sharpens it. The name he gives to the doctor is classic. As with all of Mosley's novels the surrounding cast is splendid. Every single one. Even Alfred. This man can not miss. Thank you Walter for yet another.

I'll warn you now that if you're looking for a plot summary, that's not this review.

To me, a good book is one you finish and you wake up thinking about the story the next day. This book touched me like that. I am a Walter Mosley fan from Easy Rollins days, but I have to say this may be the best I've read.

First, this book takes some sacrifice. I didn't think it was a leisurely read. It is an engrossing story; I wanted to clear the decks so that I could focus on the book and understand Ptolemy Grey. He made me sad. I found his struggle with dementia heartbreaking. I know someone who is in a very similar state. Ptolemy helped me see things from the other side and I thank him for increasing my compassion. This is the blessing in Mosley's storytelling -- his ability to build compassion, sympathy and even contempt for his characters by forcing you to understand their inner motivations.

One of the themes I love in the book is the notion of karma and simple justice. You will get what's coming to you whether it's good or bad. Even if you think you are getting away with something -- like taking advantage of an old man when no one knows but you and him, it will come out eventually. Mosley unfolds the story and reveals the characters in such a way that in the end, you may find it challenging to disagree with the outcome.

Mosley has done a great job in capturing relationships and the underlying feelings that drive them. Special kudos for showing how 'play' uncles and cousins are an integral part of black families. This book is also an excellent example how many black women often open their homes and hearts to children that are not theirs.

The only thing about the book that felt out of place was the Shirley Wring character. I felt she was unnecessary and didn't contribute greatly to the story. After willing suspension of disbelief with regard to Coy Dog's legacy, Shirley and her legacy were overkill for me. Her story was plausible; it was a just a bit too much and too coincidental. However, her addition did underscore the metaphor of elders as treasures. Shame on us as a society for discarding the generations that have gone before us.

It's hard to describe how much I admire Walter Mosley's writing. His ability to create realistic dialog, characters and actions made his Easy Rawlins detective novels a hit, but even better, Mosley never let himself fall into a rut. He kept writing detective novels, but also branched out into genres including science fiction (like Futureland and Blue Light), modern fiction, and stuff that's hard to categorize (for example, The Man in My Basement and Killing Johnny Fry: A Sexistential Novel). Each time, Mosley's gift for character and dialog lifts the novel to a place you never expected it to be.

"The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey" is a typically ambitious and fearless Mosley effort, and it mostly succeeds. The title character, Ptolemy Grey, is a 91 year old retiree, sinking into dementia. Largely trapped, both physically in his apartment and mentally in his uncontrollable memories, Grey has a series of encounters that motivate him to change his life, confront a variety of deep-set problems, and attack some long-unfinished business.

Ultimately, this novel becomes a powerful mediation on the end of a person's life. Ptolomy confronts what he has accomplished and what he has left undone, balances his love for people long dead with his obligations and connections to the generations left to come, and does his best to put his life and his own memories in order. Mosley does a great job with his characters, including Grey himself, Grey's new friend Robyn, and some characters who we only see through Grey's or other's memories, like his mentor, his childhood friend, and his grand-nephew Reggie. All of these characters were powerfully real, and fascinating.

As usual, Mosley doesn't shy away from race, and uses it to ground his characters. Born in 1929, Ptolemy lived through segregation and Jim Crow, served in World War II, and has a complicated view of race that ultimately shapes how he reacts to his friends and relatives' situation in modern Black America.

Mosley's most ambitious technique is his use of Ptolomy's sometime dementia, sometime lucidity, to write a novel that braids Ptolomy's past and present. This is often fascinating and effective, but occasionally makes for hard reading, particularly in the half of the book or more where Ptolomy is frequently floating helplessly on a sea of his memories rather than riding them. Still, this is a thoughtful, often captivating, always emotionally powerful book.

"[Ptolemy] only had one chair, and that had a book, a glass of water, and three stones he'd found that day at the park on it. They were blond stones, a color he'd never seen in rock and so he picked them up and brought them home, to be with them for a while."

That's exactly why I read Walter Mosley -- to "be awhile" with his characters, whose situations and moral complexities I always think I haven't seen, and whose unfamiliarity always softens into a fond recognition.

Here it's 2006 and 91-year-old Ptolemy Grey lives alone in squalor in south-central LA. He has a small pension, he has a radio and a TV tuned 24/7 to a dueling background of classical music and cable news, and he has sporadic contact with extended family two and three generations down the line. But his home and mind have declined since his wife died decades ago, and now dementia makes him obsessed with the ages-ago deaths of a childhood friend in a house fire and the lynching of a beloved mentor. So when another loved one dies in street violence, and a young new friend awakens Ptolemy's spirit, he embarks on a mission to protect his loved ones before his own time comes.

Mosley narrates almost completely in scenes here -- from Ptolemy's perspective, which is a mix of confusion and distraction co-mingled with vestiges of philosopher and keen observer. A key plot point about experimental drugs did require a suspension of disbelief ... or maybe it just required me to fully enter a world where the rules don't resemble the ones I know, and to appreciate the point of this book: being awhile with this man in that world. I loved every page of it.

This was a fascinating book about the relationship between a 91-year-old man Ptolemy Grey, his grandson, his great nephew and a friend of the family who was considered Ptolemy's niece and/or daughter (depending on the day). Ptolemy is suffering from dementia, but when he finds out his grandson Reggie was murdered he wants to know just what happened. After his great nephew does something that furthers the distance between Ptolemy and family, Robyn comes along with Ms. Wring to wake him up. A "deal with the devil" is made and suddenly Ptolemy's mind is a little bit sharper. He's ready to do business and solve crimes, but he sure has the ladies after him, too.

I loved this book. I don't know why I'd never read a book from Walter Mosley before--especially considering how well-known he is--but this was the first one that caught my eye. I'm glad I did. In so many ways Ptolemy reminds me a whole lot of my own 87-year-old grandfather (minus the dementia) so the relationship between Robyn and Ptolemy was dead on (minus the whole "looking at my legs" stuff). I liked the connection between the two and how they had each other's backs, and Ptolemy was one charismatic guy. I got a kick out of him. This was an easy read, and although the person who killed Reggie was predictable from the beginning, it was interesting to watch Ptolemy grow through the book.

Ptolemy Grey is a ninety-one-year-old man who is given the opportunity--if he chooses to make a pact with the 'devil'--to regain clarity of mind. There is something he desperately needs to remember, and it has to do with treasure, with a gift someone beloved entrusted to him many, many years ago....

I love the premise of this novel. I love Walter Mosley's sparse yet poignant prose. Beyond that, I love Mosley's ability to wholly comprehend the faltering mind of an ancient man and somehow depict his thinking processes. Mostly, I love the character of Ptolemy Grey.

Despite the love on every page, there is a gritty portrayal of real life here, with honest cultural truth, both good and bad. One of the richest novels I've read in a long, long time, beautifully rendered. Highly recommended.

Walter Mosley (b. 1952) is best known as a writer of African American noir featuring his lead character, Easy Rawlins. After reading the Rawlins novel "Devil in a Blue Dress", I found this recent Mosley novel, "The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey". Unlike the Rawlins series, "Ptolemy Grey" is not genre literature. Rather the book is a study of its 91 year old title character who suffers from dementia and who is able to come to a sense of purpose and a feeling of love and responsibility late in life. Learning to be a man, in this novel, is not the same thing as growing old.

The novel is set in contemporary Los Angeles, but it shifts repeatedly in Grey's mind between this setting and Grey's life as a boy in rural Mississippi eighty years earlier. As a boy of 5, Grey watched in horror as a young girl playmate died in a fire at her home. Grey has difficulty forgiving himself for not entering the burning home and rescuing her. As a child, Grey had an older friend, Coy who took the boy hunting and fishing, to brothels, and imparted his view of life to the child as a mentor. Grey witnessed the cruel lynching of Coy after Coy had stolen an enormous sum of money from a vicious white plantation owner. Coy gave the money to Grey before his lynching with instructions to use it wisely and Grey has kept the stolen treasure buried in his apartment for all the many years. Grey had a mixed relationship with his wife, Sensia which has also haunted him over the years. He loved her dearly while being tormented by her infidelities. With these and other matters from the past, Grey receives the opportunity to understand himself late in life.

The plot develops slowly with substantial indirection and foreshadowing. Mosley cunningly offers the reader an opaque summary of the end of the story before he proceeds with the beginning. Grey suffers from dementia, loss of memory, and difficulty of speech. At the beginning of the story, he lives alone in a small, foul apartment which has not been cleaned for years. Grey's wife, Sensia died of a stroke in the apartment more than 20 years before the story begins, and Grey has let it run down ever since. Grey is alone, tormented by a neighborhood woman who mugs him, and tended only by a nephew named Reggie. When Reggie becomes absent for several days, another young man and distant relative, Hilly, comes for Ptolemy and, after cheating him, takes him to his relative's home where Grey learns that Reggie has been killed in a drive-by shooting, leaving his niece without a husband and her two young children fatherless.

At the home, Grey meets and befriends a 17-year old girl, Robyn who lives with Grey's kin but is not related to them or to him. There is an immediate attraction between the 91 year old man and the 17 year old which hints of veering into the sexual but develops into a close friendship and ultimately into a father-daughter type of relationship. Robyn cleans Grey's filthy apartment and brings him a reason for living. At the same time, Grey befriends woman closer to his own age, Shirley Wring.

Much of the story turns on the deepening relationship and trust that develops between Grey and Robyn. As the story proceeds, Grey receives an opportunity to take an untested drug which will restore his memory temporarily at the cost of radically shortening his life. Grey uses the opportunity presented to him, to strengthen his human ties to Robyn and to Shirley, to provide for his family, and to come to terms with his life. As did Coy many years earlier, Grey takes matters into his own hands and is willing to engage in wrongdoing for what he
perceives as a larger sense of justice.

The primary characters, Grey, Robyn, and Coy, are well-developed. As with Mosley's noir novels, the book offers an excellent sense of place and scene, both of Los Angeles and of the Mississippi of Grey's childhood. Some of the individual scenes are highly moving and thoughtful, such as Grey's enigmatic encounter at the age of 7 with a southern minister who learns a difficult lesson from the young African American child. Coy's rather obscure teachings, which Grey keeps in the recesses of his mind, also are intruiging in themselves and play a pivotal role in Grey's late awakening. A moving, well-told story about the power of love and redemption, "Ptolemy Grey" shows that Mosley is far more than a writer of noir.

Robin Friedman

Ptolemy Grey is a ninety-one-year-old man suffering from progressive dementia, but insists on living independently in his squalid apartment. His home is a veritable biology experiment, as the mold and filth has not been cleaned in months, maybe years. Ptolemy urinates in a can because the bathroom is uninhabitable; he uses the diner down the street for the sit-down chore. He remembers pieces of his youth, enough to know there is a treasure and a secret in his past.

At home, the TV news blares 24/7 and competes with the classical and jazz music on the pumped up volume of the radio. The resultant commotion of sounds kindles Ptolemy's confusion, but occasionally serves to unearth pieces of his past or inspire epiphanies. When he walks the streets of this run-down, poor, and sometimes perilous neighborhood, he encounters the personal hazards of the forgotten and the forgetting. One vulgar woman invariably ambushes him, and beats him until she gets his money. Family members often subvert him with their dissembling.

When the comely, young, and earnest Robyn comes to help him, to scrub his dwelling to a habitable sheen, and accompany him on all his excursions, Ptolemy begins a surprising and rejuvenating end to his life that reads like a contemporary fable. Mosley imagines a drug that will restore Ptolemy's mind, but with consequences. Sort of a twist on Flowers for Algernon but with foreknowledge.

This is my first Mosely book, but I am keen to read some more and get into the woolly mind of this half-Jewish, half-black author, who is skilled with storytelling and witty with vernacular. He characterizes, with an economy of words, his black protagonist's experience in a white man's world, but he doesn't back down from exploring Ptolemy's rollicking family--the black man's experience in his own culture. And he does it with empathy and levity. There's no racial grandstanding; the author is too capable for that.

Mosley's assured opening is filled with visual and linguistic cues, placing me right at the scene and into the action, allowing me to quickly amass Ptolemy's precarious existence and his forceful but vulnerable nature. He gives us a contoured and unconventional portrait of a man's twilight days. The novel gradually evolved into something a bit more precious than its irascible beginning, but I was satisfied overall. The story will recede over time for me, but Ptolemy Grey will continue to resonate.

Whatever genres you prefer to read, you should not avoid reading Walter Mosley solely because you find his works under "mystery". Doing so will keep you from a writer that I read every time he creates a new book. But he surpasses all of my expectations with "The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey" which is poetic, distilling language to what is crucial to character. The more I read of it, the more beautiful the story became, I don't know otherwise how to describe it.
Read it and pass the word, because it is a book you will want to share with thoughtful people in your life. I would rather see this book as Oprah pick or other national reading selection than any other that I can think of.

First Line: "Hello?" the very, very old black man said into the receiver.

91-year-old Ptolemy Grey is a forgotten man. Forgotten by his family, his friends, even himself. Advancing with tottering steps into dementia, he lives in Los Angeles, in an apartment stuffed to the ceiling with mementos of his long life.

Things don't look good for Ptolemy. His physical frailty and his faulty memory make him extremely suspicious of everyone, but when he meets Robyn, his niece's 17-year-old lodger, the two of them seem to recognize in each other a kindred spirit. With lots of persuasion and elbow grease, Robyn cleans Ptolemy's apartment and moves in to care for him. She pushes him outside to interact with others, and somehow this leads Ptolemy to a doctor with an experimental drug. If Ptolemy takes this drug, he won't live to see 92, but his mind will be clear and will function properly. Ptolemy has things he wants to do before he dies, and without hesitation, he signs up.

It took me a few pages to get into this book. Mosley does a masterful job of portraying an elderly person suffering from dementia. There were so many stops and starts and false trails in Ptolemy's speech that, after a few pages, I was worn out and had to focus on something else. But those pages passed quickly, and I found myself lost in a spellbinding tale.

The second I read this character's full name, I loved how evocative it is: Ptolemy Usher Grey. Cleopatra's father, Edgar Allen Poe's House of Usher, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey. Mosley treated his title character with such sensitivity, patience, and faith that it was difficult to believe Ptolemy wasn't a living, breathing human being.

It was interesting to witness life and history through Ptolemy's eyes-- a man who lived in the South through lynchings, burnings and the Klan and a time where all his people knew they had to stand together in order to survive... to a man living in Los Angeles, the land of make believe. A land where his people are now fragmented and tearing each other apart.

The only thing that didn't quite ring true in the entire book was the experimental drug Ptolemy took in order to get his mind back. Fortunately the rest of this book is so strong and real that the drug was easy for me to shove to the back of my mind.

If you love memorable characters, please sit down with Ptolemy Grey. This frail old man will stay in your mind for a very long time to come.