Book Review : A Psychic at Hollywood’s Back Door

Seduction by Light by Al Young (Delta/Delacorte Press: $7.95; 338 pages)

Mamie Franklin is a black domestic in her 40s who lives in Santa Monica with her stroke-victim boyfriend, Cole Burley, and works in Beverly Hills for a pair of movie bigwigs, Carleton and Danielle Chrysler. Mamie has a son, Benjie, the illegitimate offspring of Harry Silvertone, a Hollywood mogul. Benjie has a good buddy, Nomo Dudu, who adorns himself in dreadlocks and may be two-timing Benjie with a nice girl named Tree. And, yes, there’s a first husband around, a musician named Chance Franklin who does occasional television public service spots, singing “Everything’s Cool . . . in the Motor Pool.”

So, altogether, these and the other characters around Mamie make up a perfect little cameo of marginal Hollywood life. There’s even a gangster in the offing, and a darling young waiter half Mamie’s age, waiting to give to her some of the love she’s missed in the last few years. But this terrestrial existence is not the life that Mamie’s interested in, really. Since Burley has had two brushes with death, and because of Mamie’s long-standing preoccupation with Ben Franklin (yes, that Ben Franklin; don’t ask me why!), Mamie has been developing her psychic powers. They range from the simple--asking her girlfriend, via brainwaves--to give her a call on the telephone, all the way to an astral projection, out-of-body experience all the way down the ages, through lots of past lives, conducted by Ben Franklin himself.

(The reader can see that this plot didn’t go over like gangbusters with the East-Coast publicists on this book. Tight-lipped, they can only write: “. . . Mamie’s now working for an eccentric white couple in Beverly Hills. She has always known she’s odd--ever since her hero, Ben Franklin, turned up on the back porch in her school girl days. But nothing has happened quite this weird before.”)

Fits No Mold

You can see where linear thinkers might get exasperated by this narrative. Nothing seems to happen in it. And it’s even possible that black activists might fling up their arms in annoyance about “Seduction by Light.” Al Young is a black novelist, and is anyone’s cause going to be furthered by a story where ghosts keep appearing, and the narrator just goes on and on about the nature of life and death; the relationship that “being psychic” has to astral projection, and the whole question of “where do we go after we die?”

(And, while I’m objecting to things, can’t a critic tag this writer for carelessness, when Burley gets skinny from his illness in the first part of the book and fat by page 54? Or when Chance, Mamie’s first husband, has been playing in the hair dye on Page 11, but days later on Page 87 has gone gray?)

It doesn’t matter. This book is for people interested in that boundary where life stops and perhaps another life begins. Put another way, it’s for people interested in the question of dying intelligently, of living one’s life so that one’s loose ends are tied up, with full respect for--and curiosity about--what’s coming next.