The title of Walter Mosley's story of two sons suggests that only one of them can make the claim to good fortune, but it's a matter of interpretation. Clearly, Eric Nolan, the privileged son of a successful doctor, blond, a natural athlete, a female magnet to all he may survey and desire, a "golden boy" -- he may well be the fortunate one. But Eric himself feels incomplete without his indispensable sibling. Tommy "Lucky" Beerman is the second son in this tale, an apparent unfortunate, born to a different set of parents and, by adoption, Eric's brother.

Which may seem a reach, since Tommy Beerman was born, not only to different parents but under great misfortune, a poor, black, fatherless first child with a hole in his lung. A short life was a foregone conclusion. But at 4-months, Tommy had the good fortune to come under the care of a caring physician. Eric's father.

Heart surgeon Minas Nolan's life became empty when his wife died in bearing Eric. He met Tommy's dark-skinned mother Branwyn during her daily visits. After six months the lonely doctor convinced the modest, beautiful lady to allow him to drive her home, fell in love with her, and took mother and son to live with him so as to, in part, give Tommy a better chance to live.

At this time in his very young life, Eric was a loud, dissatisfied, continually crying "force of nature" under the care of Vietnamese live-in Ahn. But no one could still or control the little dynamo whose tantrums could be heard out in the street. Until Branwyn and Tommy appeared. The magical transformation effected by their sudden presence in his world was the beginning of a chemical bond more profound than they could consciously understand. It was as though a cure was found for a sickness.

The changes in life and relationships persist through all the stages of the boys' growing up, growing apart, Branwyn's death, the disruptions of the family when Elton, Tommy's father, shows up to demand his son and then thrusts him into an unwanted life among the mean, the poor and the criminal. Only an inner morality and visions that anchor him to life's possibilities maintain Tommy against degrading physical forces. He stops attending school. He spends his day in an unfrequented alley. It is his private domain. Nothing can overcome him. But corruption is another matter.

Eric's life without the companionship of his alter ego is filled with a fear of causing death and destruction my the magnetic aura that just seems to be his destiny. It's a conviction that corrupts the purity of his charismatic glow. He pines for Tommy, the brother who makes him whole and whose remarkable insights fill his gaps.

Throughout his study of these remarkable character inventions, Mosley weighing the concept of love by having his characters distrust what's meant by it. They constantly ask and are asked for love only to have them consider their feelings in comparison to the few whose meaning to them is indisputable. The memory of Branwyn is an intense, reliable love without question for both boys. Who can live up to that?

The feeling is weighed and inspected as though it were a carcass in a meat processing plant. No doubt or suspected flaw in the emotion can be allowed to go untested or granted a free pass. Anything less than a bond that can't be challenged must be understood in terms of its limitations and that finite borderline consciously acknowledged.

"Fortunate Son" isn't one of Mosley's murder mysteries. With a social texture that may suggest the setting and characterizations of his "Easy" Rawlins series, he invents from a different tributary of the literary current and heads out with a mystery of the human spirit. The neighborhood might seem familiar, but it's a different beat.

Here, he's bending the corners of personal stress in an emotional environment. Suspense derives from the deep concern he develops for the destiny of his characters. Their disparities are the north-south poles that form a magnetic cohesion resistive to being forced apart by a chaotic universe.

In the end, you ponder his uncompromising and responsible questioning of the big feelings, and decide for yourself which is the fortunate son.

                                                ~~ Jules Brenner