Man Gone Down (2007)
Michael Thomas
Atlantic Books, 428pp
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 the money; Thomas goes the other way. His narrator’s quest becomes a meditation on life, abandonment, family; it is the story of the American dream gone awry.
Thomas’s tale is infused with the rhythms of jazz. Its sentences spin around, electrical, effervescent. They are sentences that are knowing, Thomas wears his influences openly: he also likes to show off. So many works are referenced, and yet it never becomes wearing, it becomes simply part of the beat; our narrator is an intellectual who has turned his back on academia, he is a man who hides his true self from others to become one of them. Though its action spans just four days, the story of this man and his family spans more time and space than that: he recalls his childhood, “a social experiment”, his university life, the occasional violence, of dreams deferred and sometimes lost.
Thomas’s novel echoes Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man most clearly: that work, with its also unnamed black American narrator, explored race relations in post-WW2 America. This then, I suppose, is the update; how America is now, post-Iraq, post-9/11. Nothing much, it seems, has truly changed. “There are white models of morality, rich models of morality, and enfranchised models of it, as well. Nobody wants mine, this I am sure of.”
This is a long, deep novel. It is epic in scope but also quiet; it luxuriates in detail and description: “the heaving surface of the water is what the night sky should be — moving and wild, wavering reflections of buildings on both sides, dark and bright, like thin, shimmering clouds.” The city weighs heavily, a millstone, so does time and identity. Thomas has shaped a powerful novel, maybe even an important one. He is a man that knows there is a price for being poor and black in America, that the system will do anything to keep a man down.
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