We never know his name. But the African-American protagonist of Michael Thomas’ masterful debut, Man Gone Down, will stay with readers for a long time. He lingers because this extraordinary novel comes to us from a writer of enthralling voice and startling insight. Tuned urgently to the way we live now, the winner of the International Dublin IMPAC Prize 2009 is a novel brilliant in its scope and energy, and deeply moving in its human warmth.
The first person narrator in Man Gone Down has not fallen, yet. But he stands at a precipice. A black man from Boston married to a white woman with whom he has three children. A once promising Harvard student now broke and working in construction in Brooklyn. When we meet the narrator, he’s had to leave his wife and children with his disapproving mother-in-law, and now has just four days to raise the money necessary to reunite the family and return the children to school.
“If you’ve ever been broke – really broke,” he observes, “there are two things you know about being so: the universe is constantly conspiring to keep you that way…”
So unfolds the richly textured four-day drama of individual survival set against the myth of an integrated and racially normalized America. “It’s strange to go through life as a social experiment,” muses the man who had been bused and tested as a youth, “groomed for leadership”, and who now remembers the great men – Ghandi, King, Jackie Robinson, Malcolm X – as posters on the wall of a childhood bedroom.
Thomas’ novel shows, in unsentimental clarity, the way the future can close mercilessly on those marginalized by race and social circumstance. “Not a train,” as he writes about the cadences of the blues, “but something coming down the track under its own unconscious locomotion.” At the same time, Man Gone Down is a superb illustration of how each moment of the present, for all of us, is braided with the past: slights and nosebleeds, lost parents and double rainbows over long-ago weddings. Memories haunt and drive the present, in this novel, even as the future presses. So on a late-night run through Brooklyn, the ash cloud of 9/11 advances in memory: “again and again, crossing the water, coming to us like a late-Cretaceous plume of postfire.”
In his four days of increasing desperation, Thomas’ narrator takes us to dark interior places, where love is questioned and life must be contemplated as an “an imploded star”. But there is always hope. In my end (as Eliot is invoked) is my beginning. And here the novel HITS its truest notes, revealing that second thing to be learned from the condition of being really broke: “that the universe is plotting your redemption as well: when all fortunes are reversed.”
To say how, or even if, this reversal is achieved would spoil the exhilarating climax of this magnificent book, a work that brings Bellow as much as Ellison to mind. At the novel’s close, we still do not know the narrator’s name, but we feel him. And having been at the deepest sites of his struggle, we are changed by him as well. Man Gone Down is a novel that will resonate long into the future, a work that devastates and rebuilds, but is attuned always to the human yearning that is the story’s beating heart.
A beautifully written, insightful, and devastating first novel, Man Gone Down is about a young black father of three in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream he has bargained on since youth.
On the eve of the unnamed narrator’s thirty-fifth birthday, he finds himself broke, estranged from his white Boston Brahmin 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 his family afloat, four days to try to make some sense of his life. He’s been getting by working construction jobs though he’s known on the streets as “the professor,” as he was expected to make something out of his life.
Alternating between his past-as a child in inner-city Boston, he was bussed to the suburbs as part of the doomed attempts at integration in the 1970s-and the present in New York City where he is trying mightily to keep his children in private schools, we learn of his mother’s abuses, his father’s abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America.
This is an extraordinary debut. It 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.
Michael Thomas’s writing recalls some of the great American masters, including Ralph Ellison, but his debut is wholly and distinctly an original. Man Gone Down is a dazzling addition to the literature of and about America today.
(From Publisher)
Michael Thomas was born and raised in Boston. He received his B.A. from Hunter College and his M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College. He teaches at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
A vibrant, well written first novel, an exploration of identity, inter-racial relationships and societal values through the eye of a black male.
| Author | Michael Thomas |
|---|---|
| Country | US |
| Nominating Library | Barbados, Bridgetown, The National Library Service |
| Publisher | Grove/Atlantic Inc. |
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