The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

"When you get old," says the 91-year-old hero of Walter Mosley's latest novel, "you begin to understand that no one talks unless someone listens, and no one knows nuthin' 'less somebody else can understand." It's a tidy summing-up of a theme that Mosley explores throughout this deeply moving story of aging and loss. In the changing and often confusing world that pensioner Ptolemy Grey inhabits, he must fight to make himself heard.

As the novel opens, we find Ptolemy living a timid, cloistered life in South Central Los Angeles, afraid to venture outside alone. He's sinking into dementia, and Ptolemy's mind, like his apartment, is becoming a jumble of memories accrued over the course of his long life. "Too many names were moving around in Ptolemy's mind," Mosley writes. "That's how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side of a closed door that he'd lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well."

Those snatches are often troubling. Memories of hard times, violence, and racism swirl through his head, along with a dull yearning for his adored wife, now long gone, and a strangely persistent tug of unfinished business. Only his great-nephew Reggie keeps Ptolemy tethered to the present, taking him to the grocery store, cashing his pension checks for him, and reminding him to eat. When Reggie is slain in a drive-by shooting, Ptolemy appears to have lost his sole anchor to reality.

At Reggie's funeral, however, Ptolemy meets 17-year-old Robyn, a bright spark whose eyes "saw things that he wanted to see." Robyn takes it upon herself to care for Ptolemy, pulling him back into the world and igniting a desire to confront the troubling questions that surround the death of his great-nephew. Before he can move forward, however, Ptolemy must find a way to cut through the fog of his own dementia. "I know how a man could lose his mind," Ptolemy says, "but how do he find it again?"