Man Gone Down

Man Gone Down
by Michael Thomas

Man Gone Down
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Book Summary Information

Author: Michael Thomas
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2006-12-07
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 432
Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat

Book Reviews of Man Gone Down

Book Review: Painful but Worth It
Summary: 5 Stars

I read this book very slowly, because sometimes it was just too painful. Michael Thomas takes you under the brown skin of a young man separated from his white wife and three children while trying to earn enough money for rent on an apartment and the private school tuition his wife expects. Its stream of conscious narration is very ambitious. Sometimes, he seems to channel Ellison's Invisible Man or Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, but you know it's present-day by the cultural references. I particularly like a few scenes where he interacts with people who rank below him (he buys a beer for a woman strung out on drugs) and above him (there's a great golf outing to a Long Island club.) Each scene and his ruminations on jazz and being bused to a white suburban school build create a complex portrait of the character's interior life.

While his wife, a New England brahmin, knows of his past--his disturbed alcoholic mother is dead, his less-disturbed but passive alcoholic father still lives--she has a kind of blind faith in him that doesn't take much note of the complexities of race and class. The person who comes closest to sharing his experiences and point of view is his one black friend from high school, who is in and out of detox.

But the part of the story that brought me to tears were his memories of the births of his children and the telephone conversations he has with them while he struggles. There were times he almost convinced me that he would leave them, and I think if Thomas had written this book in the sixties, the character would. But he finds another way through his dilemma that has more to do with his growing maturity than with external circumstances, and I closed the book wondering how all the characters survived the winter.

Summary of Man Gone Down

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 in 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.

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