Review by New York Times Review
CALL him Ishmael. It's one of a few placeholders the protagonist of Michael Thomas's first novel, "Man Gone Down," offers up as a clue to his identity. It doesn't matter if that's really his name, though, because like Melville's enlightened nonhero, this man does not expect to survive the journey. He has long known himself lost to this world. Thomas gives him his story to tell in the first person, allowing his hero more than 400 pages to narrate the events of four days and the troubled lifetime that's led up to them. A Boston-bred black man living in Brooklyn and struggling to write while supporting his blue-blooded white wife and their three children, Thomas's narrator is on the verge of losing it all. Completely broke and temporarily residing in the bedroom of a friends child, he must come up with more than $12,000 in these four days - enough money to rent an apartment, pay tuition at his children's private school and rescue his motley crew from their Brahmin grandmother's New England home, where they've been exiled for the summer. "Man Gone Down" is the story of this and other near impossibilities. Though the novel ostensibly recounts the events of four desperate days in New York, it extends far beyond these boundaries of time and space. In seamlessly integrated flashbacks, the narrator recalls the trauma of his 1970s childhood as a "social experiment," bused to the affluent suburbs of Boston from the city. He then uses these forays into the too-present past as springboards from which to investigate the fragmented histories of his abusive mother and perpetually absent father - so much "collateral damage of the diaspora." From there, flash forward to the tragedies of his more recent history: debilitating alcoholism, outbursts of violence while at Harvard, dreams deferred, if not extinguished altogether. ONE of the bigger questions posed by the novel is how to pursue the American and other dreams when the realities of race stand so mightily in the way. Indeed, just how does one negotiate a color line that runs smack through the middle of a family? The narrator's semi-ironic refrain, borrowed from Lorraine Hansberry, "Look what the new world hath wrought," wears a bit thin, but his less self-conscious reflections on the so-called race question - as it affects his kids - are powerful and moving. Going a step beyond the normal parental fascination with their children's genotype and phenotype, he acknowledges his heightened attention to the provenance of specific features: his younger son looks "exactly like" him "except he's white. He has bright blue-gray eyes that at times fade to green. ... In the summer he's blond and bronze - colored. He looks like a tan elf on steroids." Barely named products of his transgressive partnership (his sons are called "C" and "X," his daughter referred to only as "my girl"), the children are preposterous hybrids - "the wreckage of miscegenation" - at war with a nation's desired purity. His well-founded fears for them expose the lie of America's melting-pot fantasy. Here he is on his older son: "I thought, when he was born, that his eyes would be closed. I didn't know if he'd be sleeping or screaming, but that his eyes would be closed. They weren't. They were big, almond shaped and copper - almost like mine. He stared at me. I gave him a knuckle and he gummed it - still staring. He saw everything about me: the chicken pox scar on my forehead, the keloid scar beside it, the absent-minded boozy cigarette burn my father had given me on my stomach. Insults and epithets that had been thrown like bricks out of car windows or spat like poison darts from junior high locker rows. Words and threats, which at the time they'd been uttered, hadn't seemed to cause me any injury because they'd not been strong enough or because they'd simply missed. But holding him, the long skinny boy with the shock of dark hair and the dusky newborn skin, I realized that I had been hit by all of them and that they still hurt. My boy was silent, but I shushed him anyway - long and soft - and I promised him that I would never let them do to him what had been done to me. He would be safe with me." In his critique of American society, Thomas leans heavily on "Invisible Man," of course, but also on T. S. Eliot, in ways both acknowledged and unacknowledged. There is more than a touch of Prufrock's nihilism: the profound isolation of an elevated spirit ill suited to the baseness of the wider world; the despair of the hobbled stallion obliged to run the rat race. Fighting a fate preordained as much by his genes as by his country, Thomas's narrator is a man perpetually at risk. His tormented psyche subtly reveals how such ostensibly innocent American pastimes as baseball and golf can become vicious backdrops to the disillusionment of the marginal, and how kindness can be poison to those on whom it is imposed - to the point where the refusal of gifts carelessly offered becomes a question of self-preservation. Whether or not capitalism is conducive to happiness, Thomas is adamant that the rich are truly better off than the poor - not because they have more stuff, but because they are spared the indignity of perpetually having a hand out. Of always asking. But while in many ways pessimistic, "Man Gone Down" also relies on the Eliot of "Four Quartets." There are flashes of hope throughout, and the narrator is ultimately kept buoyant by love's promise. Indeed, he finds love even where it shouldn't be; for example, in the calm after a particularly vicious beating (with an extension cord) at his mother's hands: "And the places on my body where she'd whipped buzzed and seemed to rise with heat. It didn't hurt. And I knew from her face, the crazy, random face gone soft and quiet that there was, shot through the both of us and through the air, love. There was light in that little room. It moved through me, warmer than my blood. It was in her. It was all around us - the sink, the table, the counter. Her face seemed to glow from a place I couldn't discern. Love. And it wasn't so particular as her love for me or mine for her; it seemed to have always been there, and through our rawness we both felt it - balm on wounds." In a world of total dysfunction, healing plucked from the ether seems to be enough. Thomas takes a risk in his choice of first-person narration. The "I" is necessarily solipsistic, and this "I" has a massive chip on his shoulder. He has a right to carry it, yes, as he bears the weight of what seems like absolutely everything without buckling. But he indulges at times in an arrogant self-pity that can undermine sympathy for his plight. Ashamed almost of joy, he tight-ropes the line between dignified abnegation and masochism - he refuses free food though he's starving, revels in the denial of simple pleasures, takes sullen pride in being disliked by those in a position to help him. That said, this "I" also makes himself vulnerable. He is a hero - a writer - constantly in dialogue with himself, admitting his fear of the machine as he feeds it. While often showing self-righteous disdain for the mediocre world that ignores his worth, he consistently puts himself out there to be judged as well - exposing his own pettiness, his own limitations as a father, husband, son, friend, man. "Man Gone Down" might have been shorter. The scope of Thomas's project is prodigious, though, and the end result is an impressive success. He has an exceptional eye for detail, and the poetry of his descriptive digressions - "the heaving surface of the water is what the night sky should be - moving and wild, wavering reflections of buildings on both sides, dark and bright, like thin, shimmering clouds" - provides some respite from the knowledge that the city he loves can truly crush a man's spirit. A Boston-bred African-American writer who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their three children, Thomas seems to have fully embraced the "write what you know" ethos. And what he knows is how the odds are stacked in America. He knows the unlikelihood of successful black fatherhood. He knows that things are set up to keep the Other poor and the poor in their place. More than anything else, he knows how little but also - fortunately - how much it can take to bring a man down. Kaiama L. Glover is a professor of French literature at Barnard College.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist 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 2006 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
An impoverished writer wanders Brooklyn in search of the money that will reunite him with his family. Having survived horrific abuse as a child and alcoholism as an adult, the unnamed protagonist continues to suffer. Part Native American, part African American, he is obsessed with his wife's whiteness, his children's ambiguous ethnic identities, and the perceived slights of his neighbors. A father of three, he refuses to take a steady job, finish his doctoral dissertation, or even respond when addressed. This debut is ambitious, paying homage to James Joyce and Ralph Ellison, but it often suffers from writing-workshop laziness, as when Thomas details the flavor of his character's belches, the precise route of his walks, the highs and lows of his cigarettes. While the narrator's every bodily sensation and painful memory are probed, no other characters are granted interiority. Just as the perspective of this novel is selfish, its values are worldly: in what purports to be a story about art and injustice, redemption is defined as a lease for a posh address and tuition for a left-leaning prep school. Recommended for collections specializing in African American fiction or Brooklyn local interest. Leora Bersohn, doctoral student, Columbia Univ., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
One man's desperate scramble for cash, shaped into an outsized metaphorical novel on race, class and other American tensions. The 35-year-old narrator of Thomas's debut novel is a man of many talents: He's taught college English, worked construction and played guitar in clubs, all while conquering alcoholism and starting a family in Brooklyn. And as his story begins, all he's got to show for it is bupkus: Both he and his wife are out of work, and he has four days to scare up the five figures necessary to land a new apartment and cover the tuition for his sons' private school. That struggle gives this tale its narrative arc, but Thomas spends much of his time meditating on the past of his hero, who identifies as black (though he also claims Irish and Native American blood) and ponders how much race has both supported and oppressed him. It's an ambitious idea--with some obvious parallels to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man--and the book is filled with some virtuoso passages that expose the subtle degrees of racism in the narrator's world. The relatives of his wife, who is white, are condescending without being aware of it; a day-labor site turns into a proving ground between him and his Latino coworkers; and the climactic scenes on a country-club golf course detail a few unspoken moral compromises that blacks and whites make to get along with one another. It's to Thomas's credit that he takes care to not compress his scenes into simplistic parables about race, but the book's breadth is more sprawling than ambitious. The reader is presented with so many characters--in-laws, parents, friends, drinking buddies, teachers, folks from the neighborhood--that it all ultimately feels more like a fuzzy satellite photo of Brooklyn than a clear portrait of a single person. Thomas is a talented observer of how people interact and what dire financial straits feels like, but he's packed more than a couple books' worth of observations into one. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
