The Talented Mr. Ridley

All right, then: Such collapse, brought on by a toxic mix of race and other corrosive social elements, might qualify as the running theme of Ridley's fiction. Ridley asserts that each book is its own creature, spun from a voluminous but singular set of thoughts, but each also follows a certain philosophical thread; he comfortably has it both ways, again. "Obsession and alienation," he says firmly. "I write that story over and over. Those are the driving motivations in human behavior. First, the whole thing in life is finding people like you. Then it's like, 'I want kids, I want to be rich and famous, I want, I want, and I'm not going to stop until I find it.'" Is obsession, then, fundamentally evil? "Well, you can say, 'I'm obsessed with finding a cure for cancer,' or you can say, 'I'm obsessed with shooting that girl,'" he replies. "It's not good or bad. It's just what life is about." The equipoise is admirable, but usually not the moral of his stories; very often Ridley the Midwesterner, or the historical Negro, or the improbable romantic, bleeds through Ridley the disaffected modernist. "In the end," he says with some contentment, "the people in my books get exactly what they deserve."

Has John Ridley gotten what he deserves? "There's a line from A Conversation With the Mann that I love," he says. "It goes, 'Cards don't care what happened before, and dice don't forget.' The odds are that you aren't going to hit 13 back to back to back. But you can do it, and it happens. So the odds are that a black guy from Wisconsin is not going to make it in Hollywood. But he did."