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Man Gone Down

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Overview

A striking portrait of a thirty-five-year-old African American man, married to a white woman, trying to reconcile his past world with a future one he feels he has been promised.

"What a novel, and what a writer. Michael Thomas is brilliant, and Man Gone Down is riveting. Every page vibrates with love and anger and hope." --Elizabeth Gaffney, author of Metropolis

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.

Editorial Reviews

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 (c) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Michael Thomas

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.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Black Cat

Filesize

1.67 MB

Number of Pages

432

eBook ISBN

9781555847456

Awards

  • New York Times Notable Books of the Year

Excerpt from: Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas

My boy was already sick of it. He was sick of his extended family. He was sick of his private
schoolmates. He seemed world-weary before the age of seven. His little friends had already made it clear to him that he was brown like poop or brown like dirt and that his father was ugly because he was brown. He was only four the first time he'd heard it and he kept
silent as long as he could, but his mother had found him alone weeping. He'd begged us not to say anything to his teachers or the other children's parents--"they were my friends," he'd said. Claire wanted blood spilt. There were meetings and protests and petitions and apologies. People had gotten angry at the kids who'd ganged up on the little brown boy. One mother had dragged her wailing son to me, demanding that he apologize, and seemed perplexed when I noogied his head and told him it was okay. Other parents were even more confused when I refused to sign the petitions that would broaden the curriculum. Claire had been surprised.
"Why don't you want to sign?"
"What good would it do?"
"What do you mean?"
"No institutional legislation can change the hearts of bigots and chickenshits."
My boy was surrounded by them, and no one would come clean and say it, not even me. My little brown boy.