I finished Walter Mosley’s Ghalen – A Romance in Black knowing I was leaving the glow that comes from the world Mosley builds around Ghalen’s father, Robert. His neurodiverse way of thinking and feeling is special and a gift to everyone in his life. He doesn’t expect anything of other people, accepting them as they are. I became enchanted by him alongside Jamila, who meets him at the start of the novel and later becomes his wife.
Robert’s son, Ghalen, takes a while to come into focus. As a boy he is clever and organised like his mother, and he’s also shaped by his father’s simple, steady way of living. When his mother knows she is dying, she has to give him the job of handling what Robert will need help with: the bills, the transport, the organising of everyday life. It’s a lot to put on a 10-year-old, and she knows it. She feels so bad about the load she’s putting on her son, even while she knows she has to do it.
Ghalen carries that load alongside a deep love and respect for his father, and that sense of duty is what has stayed with me most after finishing the book. With his more ‘ordinary’ mind, he is the one who has to hold everything together, and it takes a toll on him, even while he loves and appreciates his father’s special qualities. That need to be the one who makes things work carries over from his life with his father into his relationships with everyone else as he moves out into the world.
It wasn’t until I wrote this review that this became much clearer to me … the beauty of his father’s mind and experience, but also the impact of ‘holding’ that person’s complexity and being the one helping to make his father’s life work.
As Ghalen grows into an independent life, he becomes more interesting, mainly because of the choices he makes. Some of them go against everything you’d expect from someone with his gifts and opportunities. One costs him a year of his freedom, and his father doesn’t try to talk him out of it. Later, at college, with his life set up to get easier, he keeps putting himself in danger. Even while he’s having a good time and helping other people, he doesn’t take care of himself because he’s been putting his father first for so long.
The writing is a big part of the appeal. It’s written in the present tense, which keeps everything in the moment, and the dialogue rings true for every character. Mosley moves between characters and forward through time with great skill, and I cared about these people the whole way through.
Ghalen is a beautifully written story of a life with some hard edges. The final pages took a turn I didn’t see coming, and I’m still not sure it worked for me. But that didn’t take away from the richness of everything that came before it.
