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Man Gone Down | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: Grove/Atlantic
Category: EBooks
List Price: $12.00
Buy New: $6.49
You Save: $5.51 (46%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 6982
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
ASIN: B0015KGWGA
Publication Date: December 7, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 Painful but Worth It June 12, 2008
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.
 Down For The Count June 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
DOWN FOR THE COUNT
I don't walk out on plays/performances even when those around me are fleeing as though they are being pursued by three-eyed slimy monsters from outer space.
I will generally slog through the most the most dismal of books because I respect and admire the talent, time and effort it takes to write a book.
I am a good audience.
However I am down for the count when it comes to Michael Thomas's "Man Gone Down."
What Dorothy Parker said of Los Angeles, "there isn't any there there" pretty well sums up my feelings for "Man Gone Down."
"There isn't any book there."
Story?
Not more than a few fleeting fragments.
I gave up the fight mid-book.
Yes it is one of the top ten books of 2007!! March 27, 2008
This was an amazing book!! I found it difficult to read at times. This has the lyrical flow of James Baldwin tied into the time shifts you would find in a Toni Morrison novel. Don't let the free association fool you. It is a great story for understanding the mental and social struggles an African American goes through. Especially one tied into an inter-racial relationship.
The core question I found rising to the top of my thoughts was; "Should I stay or should I go?" Men of all backgrounds will understand the fear and doubt associated with the idea of failing to provide for your family. We often ask: What do we do when things just don't work out for the best? What do we do when we just don't have the answer? The author eloquently puts these thoughts and doubts onto paper. The author also reminds us that regardless of how much we try not to acknowledge race our simple day to day thoughts are sprinkled with race based associations. Just look at the very public Obama campaign in 2008. As an African American male you find its always there but the key is to learn how to navigate the waters without excessive anger or unfounded fear.
I look forward to Michael Thomas' next book I'm sure he'll strip away another social layer just lurking below the surface of America.
 Truth in Labeling March 20, 2008
6 out of 12 found this review helpful
Do you remember Clicquot Club Soda? Remember that iconic label? It was hard to get passed that smiling Eskimo boy in a white fur parka carrying a bottle of Clicquot Club Soda with a label showing that same Eskimo boy carrying a bottle of Clicquot Club with a label showing the same Eskimo boy carrying a bottle, carrying a bottle, on and on, smaller and smaller. Well, Man Gone Down is a lot like Clicquot Club.
The narrator is a guy who can't seem to go beyond his label. He is African- American. It's a label that he carries with him everywhere he goes. African- American. Ask him about his world and he'll tell you that he's a social experiment: an African-American living in a white world. Go deeper---he tells you everything about himself---his prose is beautiful---his story is not. He is a well-educated, talented, attractive 35 year old African-American. Go deeper still, and you'll learn that he is also a recovering alcoholic, jobless, angry, African-American. Deeper still, he is an African-American married to a wealthy white woman and father of 3 young children. The people around him expect a lot from this multi-talented, multi-racial, you could say, multi-privileged, African-American. His dysfunctional African-American parents at least made sure he had a good education. Got him into Harvard. He had to leave after the first year because of a drunken brawl. After all, he is an African-American. Couldn't finish his dissertation because, well you see, writing about dead white guys is not an African-American thing. Follow him into the deepest recesses of his mind. Plumb the depths of his psyche, analyze his dreams; return him to the womb, go to previous generations. The answers to all his questions are right there on the label, label, label.
 Man muddles through March 5, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Nice but damaged man spends four days trying to scrape together enough money to rent apartment and pay for private school for kids apparently too precious for public school is too stressed and broke to eat but manages not to drink (one day at a time), sends mother's ashes and dead pet fish out to sea in a burning paper boat, and (spoiler coming) via a lucky golf swing and a little cheating wins thousands of dollars from some rich guys. Story woven around shimmering desciptions of digging out a decrepit town house sub-basement, a late night run from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back, encounters with snooty admissions lady and wary Bengladesh clerk behind plexiglass in ghetto bodega and other stuff does not entirely make up for the fact that the ratio of musings to plot advancement is ultimately too high. I skipped ahead and missed an important plot development--when did the fish die? But in the final analysis he's such a nice man I'm glad he doesn't go down.
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