You’re bright, thirty-something, and haven’t lived up to your promise. You wanted to be a poet. Now you teach writing and can’t finish your novel. You live in brownstone Brooklyn, in a neighborhood of young white professionals where you are stared at for your skin color. You have three small children and can’t come up with the tuition for their private school. What was the promise, anyway, that you were supposed to live up to?
The nameless, black narrator of Michael Thomas’s first novel, “Man Gone Down,” is broke. He has four days until he is to join his family at his white in-laws’ summer house. During that time he must come up with $12,000 to rent a new apartment and pay the children’s school bill. While he wanders New York, trying to secure his family’s place in the middle class, Thomas narrates his past and present in a fluid, complex story with shots of intense, virtuoso prose.
“It is a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment,” he tells us. Growing up in Boston, he was a poster child for school integration. He won the prize, a scholarship to Harvard, but felt lonely, shut out, humiliated by the groups to which he was expected to belong. The higher the emotional price he paid, the less he felt he deserved his success. “I remember the strange feeling of being both conspicuous and peripheral—an outside insider—not at all prepared for claiming and maintaining a place within the loop. I was waiting—test scores and potential aside—to be revealed as a fraud.”
His best friend Gavin was white but equally marginal, a would-be writer with a working-class Irish background and an alcoholic father. By adolescence, both were drinking heavily to drive away their uncertainty. At the start of the novel, the narrator has not touched a drink in 16 years, but Gavin is just out of detox, while another friend is schizophrenic and living on the streets.
During four anxious (but non-alcoholic) days, our narrator takes us on a remarkably acute guided tour of class and race in New York City. I can see why “The New York Times” called “Man Gone Down” one of the year’s five best novels: Thomas sees straight into New Yorkers’ souls. Living as he does at the very center of the city’s overlapping Venn diagrams—black/white, rich/poor, bohemian/banker—he is perfectly placed to observe its social patterns. He works construction jobs alongside Latinos and West Indians, bossed by Poles. He sings Dylan covers in a bar. (“I’m going to be the first big black man to sing like a skinny white guy.”) He observes the young lawyers of Cobble Hill, the mothers drinking coffee in on Atlantic Avenue, the parents of school friends. He talks with the Ferrari-driving son of an Italian construction worker and a black law student pursuing a future that money can buy.
“Man Gone Down” is clearly inspired by Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel “Invisible Man,” about a nameless black man on a political and spiritual journey through a racially divided America. But America is both less and more divided than it was then, and Thomas must look both at the obstacles to success and its dubious rewards. An admirer of T.S. Eliot, he doesn’t want to become a Prufrock, a white-collar drone among people who seem to him shallow and false. His epic journey up from poverty and self-destruction demands a more satisfying payoff than a brownstone and a closet full of suits. He thinks to himself, “It occurs to me not to ask about the dream deferred, because almost everyone knows what it is, on some level, to fail. But what happens to a dream, and yes, a dream, not a desire or hankering or an impulse or a want, but a dream, realized?”
Despite all the literary references, Thomas makes this novel of an artist’s (late) coming of age completely his own, sidestepping or subverting all the clichés of the genre. You never feel like he’s relying on received wisdom; it all feels both new and intensely observed. Much of it is autobiographical—Thomas is black, has a white wife and three children, lives in Brooklyn—but that in itself is no guarantee; Thomas views his surroundings with a keen eye. The book’s one fault is that it’s too long for the relatively minor events that take place: a racial slur that leads to a fistfight, an unsuccessful seduction, a dinner party, a game of golf, the death of a goldfish. Like other recent books in English mapping middle-class racial identities (Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty,” Colson Whitehead’s surrealistic “Apex Hides the Hurt”) it conveys uneasy relationships in fascinating detail, but sometimes at the expense of plot.
Some of the novel’s tension comes from the narrator’s desire not to fail his children, who represent, literally, his attempt to live in both black and white worlds. Being a good parent isn’t a banal, bourgeois ambition for him, but compensation for his own fatherless childhood. He fears he is too “damaged” (his word) by prejudice and poverty, and he fears what racism has in store for his kids. His older son, known as C, is dark-skinned. The younger, X, “looks exactly like me except he’s white. (…) I sometimes see the arcs of each boy’s life based solely on the reactions from strangers, friends, and family—the reaction to their colors. (…) X’s blue eyes somehow signify a grace and virtue and respect that needn’t be earned—privilege, something that his brother will never possess.”
He briefly considers leaving his wife and children and starting over, but it’s clear he’s not serious. An immigrant to the middle class, he may never feel at home in his wife’s privileged world. Yet his wife—as a person, not a representative of a class—is his lodestar, his beacon, his safe haven. At the end of the novel, improbably successful in his quest, he rejoins his wife, and together they watch their three new social experiments sleeping in the back of the car. “I start to face forward, but I turn back, take one last look at my own: the boys, I hope, dreaming in their own hue and time and my girl in the fading light; the little, changing face of love.”
Trouw, February 23, 2008. Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down (New York: Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, 2007).
Now, in 2014, I can see that this review was too New York-centric for Dutch readers. I was assuming too much knowledge of New York City and of the way Americans think about race. I’d like to think I’ve gotten better since then at translating from one culture to another, but I always have the gnawing feeling something’s getting lost—the same feeling that “Man Gone Down” illustrates so well.
A year after “Man Gone Down” was published, Joseph O’Neill wrote about the same—endlessly interesting—themes from the point of view of a white, European banker. His book, “Netherland,” reached a much wider audience. Funny how that works.