SOURCE: Smith, David L. “Walter Mosley's Blue Light: (Double Consciousness) ^squared.” Extrapolation 42, no. 1 (spring 2001): 7-26.

In the following essay, Smith discusses Blue Light in terms of the intersection of transcendental thought and the African American experience, arguing that Blue Light's lukewarm critical reception was a result of reviewers not recognizing the work as “a novel of ideas.”

In a pre-publication blurb for the first edition of Walter Mosley's Blue Light, Jonathan Lethem characterized the novel as a piece of “urban transcendentalism” (dust jacket). It's hard to tell how seriously this was intended—Lethem went on to imagine the book with a soundtrack by George Clinton. Nevertheless, with just a little refocusing, the phrase provides a reliable guide to the book's deepest themes. For “transcendentalism,” we can read “Transcendentalism”: a specific vision of human nature, human possibilities, and human limitations with roots in the writings of Ralph Waldo...