SOURCE: "Living the Blues," in Book World—The Washington Post, August 20, 1995, p. 7.

Lester is a novelist whose And All Our Wounds Forgiven was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In the following review, he criticizes Mosley for using "a story line that is manufactured, rather than proceeding logically from the lives of its characters" in RL's Dream as well as the Easy Rawlins novels.

In White Butterfly, the third of Walter Mosley's four detective novels, there is a reference to bluesmen "Sonny Terry, Brownie McGee, Lightnin' Hopkins, Soupspoon Wise." The first three are historical. Soupspoon Wise is not, and Mosley makes him the central figure of RL's Dream, his first novel outside the detective genre.

Soupspoon, an old black Southerner dying of cancer, is evicted for non-payment of rent from the New York City apartment he has lived in for 27 years. A Southern white woman who...