Man Gone Down [Paperback]

Michael Thomas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 2007

On the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday, the unnamed black narrator of Man Gone Down finds himself broke, estranged from his white wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend’s six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep the kids in school and make a down payment on an apartment for them in which to live. As we slip between his childhood in inner city Boston and present-day New York City, we learn of a life marked by abuse, abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is a story of the American Dream gone awry, about what it’s like to feel preprogrammed to fail in life and the urge to escape that sentence.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Born poor, black and brilliant in a Boston ghetto, the unnamed man of the title is, at 35, crashing at a friend's place in New York , trying to scrape up enough money to keep his family afloat. As he reluctantly returns to the construction jobs that he thought he'd left behind and works to collect on old debts (and defer his own), he narrates his Boston bildung and traces his early years and the history of his relationship with his white Boston Brahmin wife, Claire. His childhood was marked by parental neglect and early experiments with heavy alcohol consumption. A natural writer, he was taken under the wing of a prominent black intellectual during his college years, but didn't follow through as his relationship with Claire and then the demands of married life intensified. Now, as he struggles to support a life he isn't sure he believes in, he is tempted to return to drink, give up on his marriage and abandon his children, although Claire has demonstrated her unwavering support. For all of the introspection and occasional indulgence in self-pity, the narrator retains a note of hard-won optimism, and Thomas resolutely steers him clear of sentimentality. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The brooding narrator in Thomas' stream-of-consciousness first novel recites a mantra, "It is a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment." African American (or, more accurately, "Black Irish Indian"), he was a precocious child. Bused to white schools in Boston, gifted as a poet and a musician, and assured he would transcend his alcoholic parents' troubles, he developed his own drinking habit instead and deep-sixed an academic career. Now about to turn 35, married to a white woman, and a father, he has been dragged off course by a tidal wave of pain and despair and must reconstruct their dismantled Brooklyn life before the summer ends. Battered by bitter memories, and paralyzed by the poison of prejudice, which is tainting his relationships with his loving wife and sons, he works carpentry jobs, goes for long late-night runs, and seeks to exorcise his demons. By evoking the tension, longing, and beauty of the great and grinding city, summoning the mysterious power of the sea, and drawing on Melville and Ellison, Thomas has written a rhapsodic and piercing post-9/11 lament over aggression, greed, and racism, and a ravishing blues for the soul's unending loneliness. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Black Cat (2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802170293
• ISBN-13: 978-0802170293
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #357,903 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting stream of conciousness, June 22, 2007

By 

Richard A. Jenkins "Richard A. Jenkins" (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Man Gone Down (Paperback)

This clearly isn't a book for everyone, but I found it engrossing until the very end. The book is clearly rooted in the search for and struggles with identity. In many respects, it is a contemporary, post-integration era counterpart to Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man". The narrator's mixed race ancestry and largely White environment will make the book accessible to White audiences, but also should create some discomfort. The narrator's upbringing provided certain material and social advantages but also placed him in a marginal place in the world. Still, his main friends are White, as is his wife and he muddles through the obvious prejudice (racial and class-based) from his mother-in-law. The White people in his life are marginal in their own way, but the advantages of who they are carry them on better. Some of the class based issues (e.g., growing up poor in a rich suburb) cut across race, but don't overshadow it. For the narrator having Irish (and Native American) ancestry doesn't change his situation much--what ever value people put on race often fails to advantage people of mixed race backgrounds and, for the narrator, it adds to his confusion about his place in the world. Like most people, the narrator has surmounted significant hurdles such as alcoholism and less than attentive parents. On the other hand, he never fully met what other people saw as his potential, academically or occupationally and he is out of synch with most people his age, even while raising a family. His story reminded me of people who had grown up in strongly integrationist families or who otherwise found themselves outside the mainstream of African-American life.

This is not a book for people seeking simple linear story telling. It is a realistic walk through a few weeks of a man's life, although the walk is filled with backward looks and sideways glances at people, places, and events in the narrator's life. The book is basically about the struggle for identity and a place in the world, but it is not a conventionally psychological treatment, nor does it embrace the rhetoric of cultural studies or conventional identity ideology, although one can extract some of these things from the prose if one wishes. Rather, it is a realistic interior monologue with all the inconsistencies and contradictions that go with that. Some aspects of the narrator's life get surprisingly little treatment like his decision to stop drinking and his subsequent sobriety. In some ways, he seems to have simply found ways to not make that a big feature in his life.

The ending knocked a star off for me. Without offering a spoiler, let me say that it's a "surprise" that makes clear that the narrator's interior life is very different from what other people see. That point is pretty evident elsewhere in the book and I'm not sure anyone needs to be hit over the head with it, although the story clear needed some destination, if not resolution. Despite the ending being a "surprise" of sorts, it wasn't unexpected and it seemed pat and unworthy of the rest of the writing to me. It would have fit a short story better, where the narrative form often requires plotting that has some dramatic conclusion.

Still, this is an excellent book for someone who is willing to enter someone else's life and accept another person's view of the world. To the extent that White liberals (and some conservatives) often tend to see racial issues as confounded with class, the book deftly captures where that perspective is wanting. Many people, particularly White people, may want a colorblind world, but it's far from there and we have to think about how to live in the world we have with the people in it.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A love/hate relationship with the character AND the book!, February 18, 2007

By 

NaughtiLiterati (NYC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Man Gone Down (Paperback)

Sometimes it is riveting, sometimes I give it 5 stars because it was just the thing I needed to put me to sleep. But overall, an IMMENSELY satisfying read. You go on a journey with the main character as he tries to figure himself out, care for his family, and figure out where he belongs in the world - and finally be OKAY with it. He's kinda crazy, but very endearing.

There are parts of the book where you wonder what in the HELL he is talking about because of the rambling, but just as you begin to get exasperated, Thomas hits you with a brilliant passage like an espresso shot and you sit up and pay attention again. You get sick of the character but can't put the book down. You want to put the book down due the rambling, but you want to know what happens next to the character - and also know that more pleasure is to be found in the journey! This book is a literary K-hole. Heh heh heh

What works BEST to put it all into perspective is reading the discussion questions at the end of the book (in addition to being well-read), and then it will all come into place. So that is why this book is a winner and I would definitely read it again.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant at times but seriously flawed, April 22, 2007

By 

ginilyn (Seattle) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Man Gone Down (Paperback)

This is a book that I disliked at the same time that I couldn't put it down. There is brilliant writing here and wonderful insights that stay with the reader long after the book is finished. There is an examination of the African American and mixed race experience that rings true and important. But there is seemingly endless "introspection" fueled by depression and perhaps narcissism that prevented me from being completely engaged. Because all other characters are viewed only through the narrator's egoistic worldview, they never become any thing close to real. We, like the narrator, can only guess at their motives. The most blatant example of this problem is the ending - which is singularly unbelievable and unsatisfying.