SOURCE: "Soupspoon's Blues," in The New York Times Book Review, August 13, 1995, pp. 11-12.

Giddins is an American critic and biographer. In the following review of RL's Dream, he applauds Mosley's "superb reportorial eye" and notes that "several episodes are as well tuned as anything he has written," but finds the book flawed by occasional lapses into sentimentality and burdened by excessive profundities from the main character.

The "RL" of Walter Mosley's new novel, RL's Dream, is Robert Johnson, the Delta blues singer who died young and violently in 1938. (No one knows why Johnson called himself RL, and Mr. Mosley doesn't attempt an explanation.) Admired by blues connoisseurs in life, he was rediscovered by the largely white, middle-class folk and blues revival of the 1960's, and reborn in a big way 25 years later to a pop audience that acknowledged him as a dark-of-night backwoods conjurer who prefigured everything from...