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29th out of 31 books
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Man Gone Down
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 livin...more
Paperback, 432 pages
Published
December 7th 2006
by Grove Press, Black Cat
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I feel guilty for not being in love with this.
Because I should be, right? It's about an educated black writer who somehow went from being the newest test case in Boston's busing system to being a scholarship student at Harvard, and from there to being a drop-out (or kicked-out, as it were) that lands himself at a smaller college in New York, becomes a writer, marries a white woman and fathers three mixed-race children, fails at becoming a writer and suffers the financial/familial pe...more
Because I should be, right? It's about an educated black writer who somehow went from being the newest test case in Boston's busing system to being a scholarship student at Harvard, and from there to being a drop-out (or kicked-out, as it were) that lands himself at a smaller college in New York, becomes a writer, marries a white woman and fathers three mixed-race children, fails at becoming a writer and suffers the financial/familial pe...more
Okay, after reading some of the other reviews of this book i must throw down. The narrator got whipped and beaten by his drunk mother, and abandoned by his father, and people beat the crap out of him at school. regularly. and as an adult, he still has physical problems from these abuses. And his best friend got beaten up even worse than him. By his fuck-ass father. So all you people who find this novel tediously dirge-like, or overly grim, or too introverted-stream-of-consciousness, or too locke...more
There are maybe ten novels whose first reading gave me enough of a kick in the gut that I will always remember it, and this is one of them. I felt more affinity for the narrator than for any character I can recall in recent literature -- despite the fact that he is black and of the city and I'm a white kid from the sticks and the novel is very much about race; but it's more fundamentally a novel about being a husband and father and, well, a man, with all the baggage that carries, and feeling con...more
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revisited this book in 2009. i have to change my opinion about this one. i've thought about this book in the past year much more than i would have expected. the voice that holds it together, the weight of what was held together, made a much stronger impression that i'd originally realized.
my initial opinion, below, was a bit smug. rash. o well. live and learn.
how books evolve in one's mind!
_____________________
a not-badly-written, conventional nov...more
my initial opinion, below, was a bit smug. rash. o well. live and learn.
how books evolve in one's mind!
_____________________
a not-badly-written, conventional nov...more
This book had me think about how race and class impact identity and how we see the world. Are these opportunities open or closed to me or is it my perception based on how I think I am perceived due to aspects of my identity? The main character is a black man who grew up working class, married to a white woman who grew up wealthy. The book covers a few days in his life in New York City as he is broke and trying to get things together for his family. It is a deeply personal look inside what th...more
A 400+ page story that is mostly interior monologue -- very difficult to read. The repeating mantra about the difficulties this young man faced growing up and the unmet high expectations becomes tiresome.
Yet and still, there is something attractive about this book. The writing style is accessible and I really felt the brooklyn neighborhood and NY life Thomas was describing. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is the book MGD is most often compared to and I can see that. Invisible Man was a...more
Yet and still, there is something attractive about this book. The writing style is accessible and I really felt the brooklyn neighborhood and NY life Thomas was describing. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is the book MGD is most often compared to and I can see that. Invisible Man was a...more
The author does an incredible job of portraying the anxiety felt by a young black father of three, a writer, out of work, who feels ultimately accountable to his white wife and the world she has always lived in that he pretends to be a part of. It bluntly dispells any notion that, even in New York, even with three children by a white woman he loves, this man can for a moment walk down the street without being acutely aware of his race and others' reaction to it. As the narrator, every encounter ...more
Man Gone Down, Michael Thomas’s debut novel, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2009, beating off works such as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It’s story is simple: an unnamed black narrator has four days to come up with the money to pay for his kids to go to school and for the apartment for he and his family to live in; only he is broke. Some would make this story into a manic quest, full of harebrained schemes to raise th...more
Debra
added it
Poignant. Moving. Read it for what it is, an honest piece about being broke and broken. Concede it’s difficult for anyone who’s never been at zero to fully understand desperation, digging a hole and not being able to get out or the damage.
The story weaves in and out of reality, memory… much the way the mind works, there’s a rhythm many can’t or will not appreciate. Don’t expect it to make sense (sometimes the protagonist’s views are judgmental, almost diatribe like taxi drivers do here) but it’...more
The story weaves in and out of reality, memory… much the way the mind works, there’s a rhythm many can’t or will not appreciate. Don’t expect it to make sense (sometimes the protagonist’s views are judgmental, almost diatribe like taxi drivers do here) but it’...more
This was one of the strongest, most gut-wrenching reads that I have ever read. The way that Thomas sucks you in and makes you care (almost too much) for his unnamed narrator is stunning, really. There were times that I couldn't breathe I was so caught up in the book -- most notably when he buys the beer and goes down to the river. I don't think I ever have not wanted someone to have a drink as much as I did then.
Thomas also gives us an unflinching look in post-9/11, post-modern, broke-ass Ame...more
Thomas also gives us an unflinching look in post-9/11, post-modern, broke-ass Ame...more
My Library Journal review:
An impoverished writer wanders Brooklyn in search of the money that will reunite him with his family. Having survived horrific abuse as a child and alcoholism as an adult, the unnamed protagonist continues to suffer. Part Native American, part African American, he is obsessed with his wife's whiteness, his children's ambiguous ethnic identities, and the perceived slights of his neighbors. A father of three, he refuses to take a steady job, finish his doctoral ...more
An impoverished writer wanders Brooklyn in search of the money that will reunite him with his family. Having survived horrific abuse as a child and alcoholism as an adult, the unnamed protagonist continues to suffer. Part Native American, part African American, he is obsessed with his wife's whiteness, his children's ambiguous ethnic identities, and the perceived slights of his neighbors. A father of three, he refuses to take a steady job, finish his doctoral ...more
428 pages. Donated 2010 May.
On the eve of his 35th birthday, the narrator finds himself broke, estranged, homeless, his life gone awry.
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 birthda...more
On the eve of his 35th birthday, the narrator finds himself broke, estranged, homeless, his life gone awry.
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 birthda...more
I was really excited to read this book after hearing that he upset all of the other authors and won the Dublin prize for literature. Not just that, but the topic (a Black man in the inner city searches his soul) was incredibly appealing to me. However, the book was a huge disappointment or maybe it shows a lot of promise and it's a wonderful first novel for an up and coming author.
I thought it was very self-indulgent and circular. Nothing happens, which is fine if there is some intern...more
I thought it was very self-indulgent and circular. Nothing happens, which is fine if there is some intern...more
The writing style was good but the plot dragged. The main character is racially mixed and married to a Caucasian female. Their marriage is on the rocks and he has moved out of the house. The book is about the main character reflecting on his past and the disappointments in his life. With no real ambition for the future he meanders throughout his life. The author attempts to make you feel sorry for the main character. I guess because he is part African American. I didn't buy it. I never f...more
A poetic, blues-filled jaunt through a twilight of one man's experience as time and memory, by turns, foreshadow the future, haunt the present and rewound the past. Racial identity sluices through in rivulets and yet is not the sole wind that traces through its waters. Allegorical, alliterative and dream-laden, the motifs of promise, potential, hope and destiny unrealized coalesce into a meditation on the particulars of a single individual's life-course but illustrate by the transposition of th...more
This is the first novel I've ever read detailing the acute physical symptoms of anxiety. I mean, I'd read Hamsum's Hunger and Satre's Nausea which certainly detailed elements of it in a somewhat, but this was modern and accessible and very hard-hitting and personally relevant during the particular month of my life in which I read it.
I was very, very emotionally invested in the guy. I also ended up reading the large bulk of it in Madrid, on work, a time and place where I traditionally ...more
I was very, very emotionally invested in the guy. I also ended up reading the large bulk of it in Madrid, on work, a time and place where I traditionally ...more
Michael Thomas has created a narrator so real, that it's hard at times to differentiate fact from fiction. Thomas, like the narrator, is a black writer living in New York City, and both are faced with the challenges of integrating within a white world--as fathers, husbands, and sons. Through Thomas' narrator, I see clearly the struggles faces internally and externally:
"I wonder if I'm too damaged. Baldwin somewhere once wrote about someone who had "a wound that he would never reco...more
"I wonder if I'm too damaged. Baldwin somewhere once wrote about someone who had "a wound that he would never reco...more
I really wanted to like this book (the author obviously has an impressive writing style), but I didn’t. Is it because I am a White woman? This story is about a Black Irish Indian who is trying to scrape together enough money to bring his family back together. His white wife and three young children are staying with her wealthy mother while the lead, Michael straightens everything out. This story happens in about 50 pages, whereas the rest are flashbacks to his younger years as well as commen...more
I have never read anything like this novel. It has the meandering stream-of-consciousness and meticulous attention to detail of Virginia Woolf. It has the male obsessiveness with with masculinity and how it functions in time and place of James Joyce. It explores race with the rigour and nuance of a 21st century Ralph Ellison. And it describes the conundrums of class and society's basic unfairness with the storytelling skills of Dickens. And to add the cherry, Thomas is as in love with T.S. Eliot...more
I really wanted to enjoy this book about an adjunct instructor-turned- construction worker whose interracial marriage is falling apart, but the mopey narrator kept making such stupid decisions that I quickly lost sympathy for him.
Michael Thomas's novel of four crucial days in the life of an intellectually brilliant black man temporarily separated from his white wife and three kids as he struggles to pull enough money together to maintain the yuppie Brooklyn life they'd established seamlessly weaves this quest with his stream-of-consciousness thoughts about the many roles he must play, his life as a recovering addict, T.S. Eliot, and his difficult childhood. It's poetic, yet grounded in well-observed characterization and ...more
One of the best books I've read this year. I realized I don't read African American authors and really wanted to...but not a chick lit one like Dickey or Tyree. I was pulled in immediately when I found this book at BN.
The protagonist is a black man, married to a white woman and dad to two kids. He's been to Harvard, has tried to be an author, and is currently unemployed though he does masterful construction work. Throughout the book he wrestles with the idea of leaving his family. H...more
The protagonist is a black man, married to a white woman and dad to two kids. He's been to Harvard, has tried to be an author, and is currently unemployed though he does masterful construction work. Throughout the book he wrestles with the idea of leaving his family. H...more
Christina Stind
rated it
Recommended to Christina Stind by:
NY Times Book Review (Top 5 fiction 2007)
The unnamed protagonist of this book is a struggling black man, married with children to a white woman.
We follow him through 4 days where he tries to earn money for his children's tuition and a place to live and come to terms with his childhood with alcoholic and somewhat abusive parents - and figure out whether he actually wants to be with his wife or not.
I loved how you followed the main character through 4 days of trying to get a break that never really seems to come - and how he ...more
We follow him through 4 days where he tries to earn money for his children's tuition and a place to live and come to terms with his childhood with alcoholic and somewhat abusive parents - and figure out whether he actually wants to be with his wife or not.
I loved how you followed the main character through 4 days of trying to get a break that never really seems to come - and how he ...more
Beautiful writing and interesting point of view BUT the author lets his protagonist off the hook too easily. The leading character is given many advantages and throws away his opportunities to become who he aspires to be, principally because he is "brown." We are asked to accept this single condition as the cause - or excuse - for violent and aggressive acts, drug use, and dysfunctional relationships. In the end, the protagonist's problems are solved by other people rather than his ow...more
Clare
added it
The best piece of writing advice anyone ever told me was, "only describe what you want to." Or maybe it was, "you don't have to describe everything." The problem with "Man Gone Down" is that Michael Thomas too often tries to do so and ends up frustrating his reader with descriptions that explain nothing, and do nothing for the story. Too many lapses into the past, too many "such-and-such-made-me-remember"s. Don't get me wrong: "Man Gone Down" wa...more
This is really a 3 plus. I was torn about this book. Perhaps it was just longer than it should have been. This novel speaks much to being a black man in the USA in daily life as well as looking back to how his race colors his life and his decisions. Our narrator is black and depressed and it is hard to know where one trumps the other-where one is the other. A lengthy book from a very male perspective of a man deeply depressed is easy to put down. A serious well written book about race keeps m...more
For good or bad, when I've gone as far as a chapter or its equivalent in a book, I commit to finishing that book. Perhaps life is too short and there are too many good books out there to possibly waste time with something that isn't clicking with you as a reader. However, I can't not stick with a book until the (sometimes bitter) end, on the chance that it is just slow to build and win my interest and confidence, and will reward me in the end. Such was the case with Man Gone Down, by Michael Tho...more
An extraordinary book, intelligent and thought provoking. The prose is dense and powerful but seldom self-conscious. It's also an important book--there's already criticism about it out there. Caveat: It is not profitable to read this book in snatches. It demands,but also rewards, more time, closer attention.
"It's a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment," Michael Thomas's unnamed narrator muses more than once. Part Irish, part Indian, part black,he has been e...more
"It's a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment," Michael Thomas's unnamed narrator muses more than once. Part Irish, part Indian, part black,he has been e...more
I admittedly took several breaks before finishing this book. Thomas' prose is wordy and self-indulgent and often meaningless stream-of-consciousness blather. I was completely prepared to dismiss the novel completely, but then I dug in and was rewarded in a way I hadn't anticipated. The narrator is often contemptible and I found it difficult to empathize with a lot of the existential dilemmas he found himself struggling with, but at his heart is not a bad person. It is when Thomas allows the ...more
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