RL's Dream [Hardcover]

Walter Mosley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1995

Recounting his memories to a young white woman who is also a refugee from a painful Southern past, Soupspoon Wise, a dying blues performer, describes a brief encounter with a famous performer that still haunts him. by the author of Black Betty. Tour.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After four increasingly well-received crime novels starring Los Angeles PI Easy Rawlins, Mosley has moved strongly ahead to a more searching and deeply felt style and subject. He writes here of Atwater "Soupspoon" Wise, a battered, failing relic of a man who once played backup to legendary Delta jazz guitarist Robert "RL" Johnson and who is now barely surviving on New York's Lower East Side. When we meet him, Soupspoon, who has cancer, is being evicted from his tiny apartment. Enter Kiki Waters, a hard-drinking, profane redhead who fled a life of horror and incest in Arkansas and now ekes out an uneasy living at a Wall Street insurance firm. With her tough street smarts, she stops the eviction cold, uses her office know-how to fake lavish health insurance for Soupspoon and moves him in with her. They cling together, these two outcasts from hard times, Soupspoon with a gentleness born of deep resignation, Kiki with a protective desperation fueled by booze and rage. Gradually, Soupspoon's life begins to mend: someone he knew as a kid in the South offers him a gig at his after-hours drinking place; a pretty young girl is drawn to his sweetness. But for Kiki, the only way out is through violence and flight. Mosley has always been a vivid writer, but here his work achieves a constant level of dark poetry: he flawlessly integrates Soupspoon's and Kiki's past harsh lives and memories with the keenly observed contemporary New York slum scene as the bittersweet blues constantly sound somber chords beneath. There is no false sentimental note anywhere in the book, just a deeply moving creation of two extraordinary people who achieve a powerful humanity where it would seem almost impossible it should exist. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Atwater "Soupspoon" Wise, an aging bluesman in New York City, is evicted from his apartment. Kiki Waters, a young white woman, takes him in, nursing him back to health and forging the necessary health insurance information to get him treated for cancer. The two form a strange friendship; both are from the South, and both have left behind pasts that demand to be dealt with. Soupspoon knew the legendary Robert "RL" Johnson in his youth and is haunted by the desire to learn the secret of Johnson's music; Kiki was abused by her father and ran away in her early teens. Mosley's swirl of characters, locales, and memories is intoxicating, and the plot moves forward relentlessly, taut as the mystery novels (e.g., Black Betty, LJ 5/1/94) for which he is renowned. Highly recommended.
-?David Dodd, Univ. of Colorado at Colorado Springs
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 267 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton; 1st edition (August 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393038025
• ISBN-13: 978-0393038026
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,250,358 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Walter Mosley is one of America's most celebrated and beloved writers. His books have won numerous awards and have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Mosley is the author of the acclaimed Easy Rawlins series of mysteries, including national bestsellers Cinnamon Kiss, Little Scarlet, and Bad Boy Brawly Brown; the Fearless Jones series, including Fearless Jones, Fear Itself, and Fear of the Dark; the novels Blue Light and RL's Dream; and two collections of stories featuring Socrates Fortlow, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, for which he received the Anisfield-Wolf Award, and Walkin' the Dog. He lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love and goals most don't know, January 8, 2000

By 

"oquinn" - See all my reviews

This review is from: R L's Dream (Paperback)

This book has a relationship that would be strange and eccentric to most Americans.Yet, if readers can drop their middle-class values and judgments long enough to get to know the characters, they will, by the book's end, have experienced a story of love between people that they feel they know and care about themselves, and understand goals they themselves would never have.

This is a revelatory tale of losers and the lost, who nonetheless strive to love and to fulfill their dreams, and most readers who can find the newness of a world and people foreign to their own experiences will hope the dreams of these characters come true.

Mosley is a wonderful presence in the American literary scene, not just a mystery/crime writer as some have "written him off" as being. His smooth prose and flow of language, as well as his sensitivities to people and places that make them become more real than comfortable suburbanites in comfortable suburbia, glow with an intellect and emotional intonation found in few modern writers.

Mosley knows the world does not belong only to the middle-class or wealthy, and he makes his readers know it, too, in ways that touch their hearts and make them re-examine their own definitions of love and the natures of their goals.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mosley steps out of genre to create a classic, August 11, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: RL's Dream (Hardcover)

Walter Mosley was always an uneasy fit in the detective genre, and except for Blue Light, his works outside that genre were more compelling than the stuff that made him famous -- Gone Fishin' and Always Outnumbered both outshine his mysteries.

I think this is because what Mosley is best at is creating characters deeply affected by their roots in Southern poverty and racism. Having to shoehorn the characters and incidents he wants to talk about into even the unconventional format of the Easy Rawlins mysteries makes for an uneasy fit. Always Outnumbered, Gone Fishin', and RL's Blues are less plot-oriented, more freewheeling, and they give Mosley the room to spread out. Like a musician, Mosley is often at his best when he is just riffing. Much as he describes blues lyrics in this book, putting words together that don't make sense unless you are there hearing them with the audience, Mosley puts scenes together in ways that defy traditional narrative yet increase their emotional power.

Freed of the constraints of his mysteries, Mosley has created a very powerful work containing several exquisitely drawn characters and some of the most moving prose I've read in years. RL's Dream ranks among the best works of one of the few popular novelists today who I think we'll still be reading, even studying, a hundred years from now.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars mosley at his very best, April 1, 2000

By 

T. Bekken (Austmarka Norway) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: RL's Dream (Hardcover)

Together with "Always Outnumbered,..." this is Mosley's greatest achievement. It puts Mosley on the same level as James Baldwin and Richard Wright; it has Baldwin's epic qualities combined with the pride and outrage of Wright's best moments. Mosley is very much his own man, though, and it all makes for one hell of a great novel. Probably an American classic of the late 20th century.