Let go from his last job for stealing (a realization that seems to come as a surprise), Blakey is worried about being able to pay the mortgage on his seven- generation house, although not worried enough to rigorously seek out the employment necessary to earn the required money. The protagonist of the story, the man whose basement is in question, is Charles Blakey, a 33-year-old slacker ambling through life with little ambition or future. At the same time, we are equally compelled to constantly reach back for solid ground as each layer proves more injurious and restricting to arriving at any substantial answers as the last. The reader is compelled to eagerly push forward through the prose, to peel back the layers of Mosley’s narrative with an explorer’s keen eye and an artist’s easy touch.

Mosley does not offer his characters nor his readers any easy answers to these questions rather, he establishes a richly textured narrative that is at once seductively simple and highly complex from which we are to elicit our own suspected definitions of the truth. Each question is more emotionally, psychologically and philosophically intricate and resonant than the last until the reader is left with just one: How does one distinguish good from evil in a society whose nebulous moral constitution confounds any and all attempts in doing so? In it, Mosley assaults the reader with more questions about life and death, freedom and enslavement, power and powerlessness, reward and punishment, guilt and innocence.

What would you do if a stranger offered you $50,000 to rent your basement for a couple months? This is the first question Walter Mosley poses in his gripping and unsettling new novel The Man In My Basement. It’s a question of humanity and what is done in that name. ( From the publisher.It’s not a question of good and evil. Richly textured and compelling, The Man in My Basement is a new literary pinnacle from an acknowledged American master. Sure enough, he has a very particular-and bizarre-set of requirements, and Charles tries to satisfy him without getting lured into the strangeness.īut he sees an opportunity to understand secrets of the white world, and his summer with a man in his basement turns into a journey into inconceivable worlds of power and manipulation, and unimagined realms of humanity. He knows that the stranger must want something more than a basement view. When a stranger offers him $50,000 in cash to rent out his basement for the summer, Charles needs the money too badly to say no. Worst of all, he's fallen behind on the mortgage payments for the beautiful home that's belonged to his family for generations. His parents are dead, he can't find a job, he drinks too much, and his friends have begun to desert him. Charles Blakey is a young black man whose life is slowly crumbling.

The man in my basement