The eponymous professor in Walter Mosley’s John Woman is the kind of academic that infuriates people. In fact, he infuriates a lot of people in the book itself. John calls himself a deconstructionist historian (though I think he could easily call himself a postmodernist historian). He contends that, while there might be historical truth, we can’t know what it is because a) there’s too much information to know, b) too much of that information is unrecoverable, and c) history is just a bunch of stories we tell ourselves. While we might be able to say that John Wilkes Booth fired the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln, we can’t know definitively what lead to that event or what came from that event. The historians in John’s department at the New University of the Southwest loathe him—and they don’t even know that he once murdered a man with a lug wrench.
John Woman was born Cornelius Jones, the son of a projectionist at a vintage movie theater who taught himself history. Herman Jones taught Cornelius that history was completely up for argument. The first third of the story gives us the life of Cornelius, until he starts to change his name and take on academia. I started to enjoy the book a lot more once the action moved from New York to rural Arizona and the New University. Much of the rest of the book consists of John tormenting his students with his efforts to teach them the same lesson he learned from his father. I know from experience that it’s hard to get 18-24-year-olds to reconsider everything that they thought was true. I can just picture the students either glaring at John while he lectures or staring at him in incomprehension.
The narrative gives John a lot of opportunities to expound on his life’s thesis and methods for taking history apart. To be blunt, a lot of it is very didactic. If you’re not into what John is teaching, parts of this book are going to be a slog and you might be bewildered by why a powerful group of people are so interested in John that they are willing to pull a lot of strings for him. I was on board with John’s theories, but then I’ve been exposed to a lot of postmodernism as a young English major. I’m disposed to see everything as stories.
For me, the best parts of John Woman come at the end, when John had to face his own revelations about what he thought was true. If these epiphanies hadn’t been included, I think I would have dismissed the whole thing as a vehicle for interesting ideas. The parts of the book that deal with John’s sex life put me off, to be honest—though I suppose one could see them as yet another manifestation of the human need to lie to ourselves with stories to make sense of the world around us. John Woman is a slow boil, so readers need to be prepared for a wait until the tables start turning and the plot speeds up. Readers who can stick it through the academic sections (and the sex) will, I think, be rewarded with a story that puts John’s theories to the test—and maybe change how we look at the stories we’ve been told all our lives.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss, for review consideration. It will be released 4 September 2018.