MAN GONE DOWN
Michael Thomas
Grove/Atlantic, 2007
A New York Times Top Ten Best Book of 2007
Longlisted for the 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Winner of the 2009 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Evoking the work of great American masters such as Ralph Ellison, but distinctly original, Michael Thomas' first novel is a beautifully written, insightful, and devastating account of a young black father of three inf a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream. 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. With only four days before he's due in to pick up his family, he must make some sense out of his life. Alternating between his past -- as an inner city child bused to the suburbs in the 1970's -- and a present where he is trying mightily to keep his children in private schools, we learn of his mother's abuses, his father's abandonment, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is an extraordinary debut about what it feels like to be pre-programmed to fail in life -- and the urge to escape that sentence.
"The fierceness of those early passages is imposing. And when it takes flight the writing is beautiful and hypnotic..."
—The Daily Telegraph (UK)
"Man Gone Down could serve as a primer to the literature and art of the American dream... Thomas's writing is no less than luminous."
—The Guardian
"Powerful and moving . . . An impressive success . . . [Thomas] knows 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, The New York Times Book Review
"[A] jazzy, sinewy debut . . . Thomas's urgent, quicksilver prose makes even the darkest moments of this novel shine."
—Cathleen Medwick, O, the Oprah Magazine
"The narrator's hard-bitten realism and Thomas's blues-dirge-y storytelling instincts keep the narrative thrumming."
—Jonathan Durbin, People Magazine
"...the narrator retains a note of hard-won optimism, and Thomas resolutely steers him clear of sentimentality."
—Publishers Weekly
"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."
—Booklist (starred review)
