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 (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007
ISBN: 0802170293
Number of pages: 432
Publisher: Black Cat

Book Reviews of Man Gone Down

Book Review: Interesting stream of conciousness
Summary: 4 Stars

This clearly isn't a book for everyone, but I found it engrossing until the very end. The book is clearly rooted in the search for and struggles with identity. In many respects, it is a contemporary, post-integration era counterpart to Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man". The narrator's mixed race ancestry and largely White environment will make the book accessible to White audiences, but also should create some discomfort. The narrator's upbringing provided certain material and social advantages but also placed him in a marginal place in the world. Still, his main friends are White, as is his wife and he muddles through the obvious prejudice (racial and class-based) from his mother-in-law. The White people in his life are marginal in their own way, but the advantages of who they are carry them on better. Some of the class based issues (e.g., growing up poor in a rich suburb) cut across race, but don't overshadow it. For the narrator having Irish (and Native American) ancestry doesn't change his situation much--what ever value people put on race often fails to advantage people of mixed race backgrounds and, for the narrator, it adds to his confusion about his place in the world. Like most people, the narrator has surmounted significant hurdles such as alcoholism and less than attentive parents. On the other hand, he never fully met what other people saw as his potential, academically or occupationally and he is out of synch with most people his age, even while raising a family. His story reminded me of people who had grown up in strongly integrationist families or who otherwise found themselves outside the mainstream of African-American life.

This is not a book for people seeking simple linear story telling. It is a realistic walk through a few weeks of a man's life, although the walk is filled with backward looks and sideways glances at people, places, and events in the narrator's life. The book is basically about the struggle for identity and a place in the world, but it is not a conventionally psychological treatment, nor does it embrace the rhetoric of cultural studies or conventional identity ideology, although one can extract some of these things from the prose if one wishes. Rather, it is a realistic interior monologue with all the inconsistencies and contradictions that go with that. Some aspects of the narrator's life get surprisingly little treatment like his decision to stop drinking and his subsequent sobriety. In some ways, he seems to have simply found ways to not make that a big feature in his life.

The ending knocked a star off for me. Without offering a spoiler, let me say that it's a "surprise" that makes clear that the narrator's interior life is very different from what other people see. That point is pretty evident elsewhere in the book and I'm not sure anyone needs to be hit over the head with it, although the story clear needed some destination, if not resolution. Despite the ending being a "surprise" of sorts, it wasn't unexpected and it seemed pat and unworthy of the rest of the writing to me. It would have fit a short story better, where the narrative form often requires plotting that has some dramatic conclusion.

Still, this is an excellent book for someone who is willing to enter someone else's life and accept another person's view of the world. To the extent that White liberals (and some conservatives) often tend to see racial issues as confounded with class, the book deftly captures where that perspective is wanting. Many people, particularly White people, may want a colorblind world, but it's far from there and we have to think about how to live in the world we have with the people in it.

Summary of Man Gone Down

On the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday, the unnamed black narrator of Man Gone Down finds himself broke, estranged from his white 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 the kids in school and make a down payment on an apartment for them in which to live. As we slip between his childhood in inner city Boston and present-day New York City, we learn of a life marked by abuse, abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This 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.

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