Mosley's 'Last Days' Restores Memory, But At A Cost from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

Walter Mosley is the author of more than three dozen novels, including many mysteries featuring the L.A. detective Easy Rawlins. His latest novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, is about a 91-year-old black man entering the early stages of dementia and the last years of his life. But Grey's life changes after he meets a 17-year-old teenager named Robyn, without a family of her own. Robyn cares for Ptolemy and introduces him to a local doctor, who invites him to join an experimental drug study that will help bring back his memory — but will simultaneously also shorten his life span. And Ptolemy must decide what to do.

Read the full NPR feature story here. Download the Fresh Air podcast here. Also, the LA Times had this to say about the novel:

In "The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey," Mosley returns to contemporary Los Angeles with a daring, beautifully wrought story that incorporates elements of allegory, meditative reflection and the lilt of lyric tragedy. For obvious reasons, we can never know the confusion and loss of intellectual faculties that so often attend old age, but in this novel Mosley gives as convincing an evocation as you're likely to encounter in literature. The result is an unexpectedly profound novel of the subtle links between memory and identity, of the difference between forgetting and having the past stripped from you, of what it may mean to be lost, first to those around you, then to yourself. Mosley's unlikely protagonist is Ptolemy Grey, a 91-year-old African American living as a near-recluse in a filthy, rented apartment in one of South L.A.'s meaner neighborhoods. His flat is cluttered with trash and the material fragments of a life dissolving in dementia. Ptolemy's beloved second wife, Sensia, is decades dead; roaches patrol his kitchen counters; his bathroom hasn't worked for years and he sleeps under a table in the living room, perhaps because his bedroom is stuffed with a pack rat's junk, perhaps for darker reasons. Even he is no longer quite sure. His real companions are a classical music radio station and an all-news television channel that he keeps on simultaneously, day and night.

See also: Known to Evil (A Leonid McGill Mystery), The Long Fall, The Long Fall: The First Leonid McGill Mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins Mysteries)