Behind blue eyes

More than a dozen books into his career, Walter Mosley still is best known as the inventor of Easy Rawlins, whose color-coded adventures began with “Devil in a Blue Dress” in 1990. Yet the author has persistently pushed the envelope since then, venturing into sci-fi (“Blue Light”), polemic (“Workin’ on the Chain Gang”) and such free-standing fictional creations as “RL’s Dream.” His newest, “The Man in My Basement,” falls into the latter category. It also represents Mosley’s first excursion into what might be called the Gutbucket Novel of Ideas -- the kind of thing Thomas Mann would have written had he ever thought to set a story in a “secluded colored neighborhood” of Sag Harbor, Long Island.

That isn’t to say Mosley’s characters are idea-driven abstractions. The narrator, a 33-year-old layabout named Charles Blakey, has a mental life all his own, albeit a depressing one. Having lost his job at a local bank after pilfering the till, he’s holed up in the family house with $15.76 to his name and a supply of cheap booze. That gives him plenty of time to ponder his history as a compulsive liar.

“I’ve lied all my life,” he recalls. “To my parents and teachers and friends at school. I lied about being sick and not coming in to work, about romantic conquests, my salary, my father’s job. I’ve lied about where I was last night and where I was right then if I was on the phone and no one could see me. I have lied and been called a liar and then lied again to cover other falsehoods.” Into this hotbed of failure and mendacity comes Anniston Bennet, a mysterious WASP who wants to rent Blakey’s basement for the summer. At first the narrator rebuffs him. A white face would hardly fit into the neighborhood, and in any case the basement has been accumulating ancestral junk for nearly two centuries. Eventually, financial pressure wears down the cash-strapped protagonist. He accepts Bennet’s exorbitant offer of nearly $50,000 for 65 days and agrees to fulfill certain conditions for his tenant, who seems to transmit a peculiar combination of guile and transparence: “His blue eyes were a perpetual shock, but there was no wonder or magic in the rest of his face.” The peculiarity, as it turns out, goes way beyond Bennet’s features. Once Blakey has emptied out the basement -- and discovered that many of the relics are museum-quality antiques -- Bennet orders him to assemble a large metal cage in the bare room. There he will spend his summer, a bald hermit in pajama bottoms, doing penance for some unspecified sin. Blakey, for all intents and purposes, will be transformed into his warden.

Blakey goes downstairs each day with food, water and fresh reading material. (The prisoner, an old-school autodidact, intends to read the complete 11-volume “Story of Civilization” by Will and Ariel Durant.) Blakey also initiates a series of dialogues with his charge, who’s quite literally a captive audience. At this point, the Magic Mountain-like clash of ideas kicks into high gear.

What’s the subject of the debate? Bennet soon reveals himself to be a squalid international crook. “With a word from me,” he tells Blakey, “your life could end. Maybe just with a gesture. A sentence could level a city block or blow a jetliner out of the sky. A dream could destroy Philadelphia. A disagreement could throw western Africa into famine for five years.” With such a resume, it’s no wonder he makes the case for evil as a necessary expedient. His interlocutor, meanwhile, tries to hold firm to his own rather blurred conception of right and wrong. He also finds himself drawn into Bennet’s psychological orbit. When the prisoner asks Blakey whether he’s ever killed anybody, this career dissembler bridles, panics and offers a strange confession of his own: “Bennet’s question was the deepest contact that I had ever had with another human being.” Clearly Mosley is restaging a timeless philosophical debate. Just as clearly, he’s erecting a narrative structure so schematic it threatens to crush the story beneath it. Black and white, rich and poor, power and impotence -- the oppositions are too neat, too easy and so is Bennet’s transformation into a source of paradoxical wisdom. In the real world, those blue eyes and bloody hands would require a lot more in the way of redemption.

The problem is further compounded by Mosley’s prose, which has little of the colloquial zing you find in the Easy Rawlins novels. Perhaps he thought this Socratic smack-down called for a plainer style -- that slang and epistemology didn’t mix. To be fair, the dialogue displays some of his familiar verve, as do the peripheral sex scenes. (Mosley isn’t one to let good and evil get in the way of a little soft-core gratification.) Still, Blakey’s travails have an airless quality to them, as though he, too, were trapped in a basement, starved for oxygen and natural light. In a metaphorical sense, of course, that’s exactly the case. But it doesn’t absolve the author of his duty to breathe a little more life into these notes from the underground.