Michael Thomas 978-0-8021-7029-3 Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic 432 Pages; First
Printing: January 2007
Ever wondered what happened to
Ralph Ellison’s narrator from Invisible Man? Michael Thomas symbolically resurfaces
him via a long-form elegy, drawing from a broad literary canon, primarily T. S.
Eliot. Initially one wonders whether the unnamed narrator’s cynicism is
warranted or does he simply have a bad attitude.
The early presentation is
clear: he and his friends are casualties of a war, a “social experiment” that
has essentially left them suffering from one form or other of PTSD (Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder). For the unnamed, his Sisyphean boulder was to be the “light”
through the darkness of America’s heart. He tried, or at least he went along for
the ride – busing for integration in Boston, briefly attended Harvard, near
completing his graduate studies, and married a white woman with whom he has
three children. Along with all he has accomplished, he is also weighed
down by his parents, his upbringing amidst abuse and abandonment, and other
traumas. Man Gone Down opens as the unnamed is leaving his family in New
England to return to New York. He has a task in front of him, to come up with
over twelve thousand dollars so his children can attend private school and have
a place to live. What follows is the classical literary walk through or toward
hell, where he recounts his life, interacts with acquaintances and friends in
his changing Brooklyn neighborhood, and finds work as a day laborer at
construction sites. This job is a return to a time when he was building the
predestined life of writer, academic, a renaissance man. He abandoned those
dreams when he simply could not hold together the stitching of his fractured
past. More than anything, Man Gone Down
provides an opportunity to look deeply into the soul of a man succumbing to the
weight of expectations heaped upon him.
Recommendation: HIGH
Recommendation: HIGH
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Reviewed by Guichard Cadet
