Walter Mosley's stock has soared since his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, was published in 1990. The book was made into a film starring Denzel Washington, and today Mosley is one of America's most popular black writers. He is also alarmingly prolific - he has written more than 20 books. Mosley is most famous for his detective mysteries featuring Easy Rawlins, an aimless Second World War veteran who reluctantly becomes a private investigator to cover mounting mortgage payments. Rawlins's work brings him into contact with people from different backgrounds, and the stories invariably explore some facet of racial and economic inequality in the US.
Fortunate Son shares its title with J H Hatfield's biography of George W Bush, which first appeared in 2000. This is probably not a coincidence: Hatfield's biography argues that wealth and privilege got Bush where he is today, and Mosley's novel is a social allegory that draws a number of contrasts between America's haves and have-nots. The story opens with an unlikely romance between Branwyn, a black single mother, and Minas Nolan, a wealthy doctor whose wife recently died in childbirth. Conveniently, their infant sons are the same age, and before long the boys are being raised as brothers.
Eric is a healthy, robust baby with "golden hair and eyes the colour of the Atlantic Ocean", while Thomas is sickly and weak. Eric monopolises their expensive toys, while introverted Thomas spends his time cataloguing sticks and insects. Nevertheless, the boys are devoted to each other. Children in the playground claim that "black and white can never be brothers", but their bond suggests otherwise.
Then tragedy strikes the makeshift family and the boys are separated. Six-year-old Thomas is forced to live with his real father, an angry man hardened by a lifetime in the ghetto. From this point on, Thomas's life is full of horrors: poverty, violence, homelessness, criminality and eventually prison. Eric, on the other hand, grows up in a "circle of light", with money, women and academic success falling into his lap. Yet Thomas can always see the beauty in the world, while Eric trusts nothing and feels detached from everyone around him. It is unclear which of them is really the more "fortunate".
Mosley writes in spare, evenly cadenced prose reminiscent of Richard Wright or Raymond Chandler. But the story is formulaic. The characters feel like figures in a morality play, their names denoting their symbolic function (Eric is a partial anagram of "America", while a downtrodden black man with a good heart is called Elton Trueblood). It is difficult to identify with any of them; even Thomas is more of a mouthpiece than a real person. "We all lucky, Eric," he says. "The luckiest ones are the ones happy about bein' alive."
As the story progresses, the moralising be comes overbearing. Juxtaposed episodes of Eric's and Thomas's life make the comparisons tediously obvious: Eric's sexual prowess is mirrored by Thomas's inexperience; everyone wants to be Eric's friend, while Thomas invents an imaginary friendship with a rotting corpse. Mosley is making an important point, but he lets himself down with his crudely reductive approach. Worse still, the book is full of racial stereotypes: there's a handsome white doctor, a black drug dealer with bulging biceps and a superstitious Vietnamese house servant. Ultimately, this parable is not only unsophisticated; it is self-defeating.
