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Walter Mosley's creation, Easy Rawlins has traveled through the 20th century and given voice to the racism and unrest of the times, starting in the 40s in post-war Los Angeles. It's now the 60s, post Watts riots and into the 'summer of love' and Rawlins is uncomfortable with some of the changes; he's encountering hippies and counter-culture folks for the first time, and he's not of an age where smoking dope, dropping out and joining communes makes sense. Rawlins has worked hard to become mainstream, and while he thinks that were he 20 years younger, he'd have joined in, it seems unlikely. He's too tamped down to feel comfortable with the easy values and dramatic statements and changes of the times. In this story, his adopted daughter is extremely ill and apparently the only treatment to save her from what is vaguely described as a blood virus can be found at a clinic in Switzerland. Easy's lover Bonnie, who's a flight attendant can arrange for Feather's treatment, but the clinic wants $35,000. It becomes apparent that Bonnie called in favors, in large part, probably from a lover, in order to get the child into the clinic. This odd story line for me did not ring true, I admit; the idea of people flying to European clinics to be cured of not very clearly described diseases, when apparently no one anywhere in America could, or would help, just smacked of make-believe. Maybe there were such clinics; nowadays, medical information is easier to come by maybe, but I just didn't find this solution believable. Easy's passion for Feather, his determination to see her well leads him to make some decisions that seemed iffy as well. While Mouse wants him to help in an armed robbery, he puts Mouse off, taking the case, instead of a Robert E Lee, a descendent of the confederate general, who claims he wants Easy to find a young woman, who knows the whereabouts of a man who stole some papers that Lee wants back. None of this is exactly true, and Lee is an absurd figure. He refuses to meet almost everyone he does business with, but Rawlins insists that his mother would have wanted him to meet his employer, so Lee appears. Lee's assistant, a mysterious woman named Maya Adamant, is Easy's contact in San Francisco. Easy searches the bay area first, looking for the man, Axel and his friend/companion Philomena, known as Cinnamon, for her skin tone. Again, I had problems with the reality presented in this story, although I've usually found Mosley's Rawlins' books to be wonderfully told. But in this particular story, every counter-culture person Easy meets is more stereotypical than they deserve. The hippies are stoned, dirty, with bad teeth and very limited understanding of the world. The hitchhiking couple he gives a ride to are going to a commune, but when Easy tries to relate that to what he knows, what he's read, they act like idiots who've never heard of big C communism or any other form of living. Granted, there were some pretty dumb people smoking joints, dropping out and moving to the land in the 60s, but many others were seeking true experiences in living in other ways, were serious students of the communal movements, and weren't always drugged out and dirty. Maybe Mosley's own experience of the times were different from mine, but his San Francisco and Berkeley seemed to come solely from stories about drug burnouts and 'dirty hippies' with a contempt for just about everything but the idea of 'free love' but even that Rawlins sneers at, without grasping what it meant to some people. The reason that people are searching for Axel Bowers was odd to me; it seemed forced when Easy discovers Nazi paraphernalia and later, discovers that the 'papers' being sought, the bearer bonds, have the signatures of major Nazi leaders on them. I'm used to a relatively seamless story from Mosley; this one offered a sense of unreality that was too hard to swallow. Rawlins is still a fascinating character. You watch him walk the line that he constantly must walk, between legit property-owning, respectable citizen (who still get s hassled daily by cops just for, say, using a phone, or walking into a store solely because of the color of his skin) and someone who would consider committing a felony to get money for a nebulous enterprise. What I've always liked about this series is its first portrayal of the realities of urban life in the middle of the last century, life in LA, life for African-Americans, the racism, the uproars, the times, the riots and how people dealt with them. CINNAMON KISS had a strong sense of unreality and a frayed ending, where some things wrapped up too quickly. For the first time, an Easy Rawlins book did not come together for me.
Reviewed by Andi Shechter, August 2005
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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