Man Gone Down

Tiny McElroy Ansa

In the end, the novel itself is rather like its main character: a brilliant and frustrating social experiment that is still quite worthy of our attention.
— The Washington Post

Kaiama L. Glover

Thomas seems to have fully embraced the “write what you know” ethos. And what he knows is how the odds are stacked in America. He knows the unlikelihood of successful black fatherhood. He knows that things are set up to keep the Other poor and the poor in their place. More than anything else, he knows how little but also - fortunately - how much it can take to bring a man down.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Born poor, black and brilliant in a Boston ghetto, the unnamed man of the title is, at 35, crashing at a friend's place in New York , trying to scrape up enough money to keep his family afloat. As he reluctantly returns to the construction jobs that he thought he'd left behind and works to collect on old debts (and defer his own), he narrates his Boston bildung and traces his early years and the history of his relationship with his white Boston Brahmin wife, Claire. His childhood was marked by parental neglect and early experiments with heavy alcohol consumption. A natural writer, he was taken under the wing of a prominent black intellectual during his college years, but didn't follow through as his relationship with Claire and then the demands of married life intensified. Now, as he struggles to support a life he isn't sure he believes in, he is tempted to return to drink, give up on his marriage and abandon his children, although Claire has demonstrated her unwavering support. For all of the introspection and occasional indulgence in self-pity, the narrator retains a note of hard-won optimism, and Thomas resolutely steers him clear of sentimentality. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

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 dissertation, or even respond when addressed. This debut is ambitious, paying homage to James Joyce and Ralph Ellison, but it often suffers from writing-workshop laziness, as when Thomas details the flavor of his character's belches, the precise route of his walks, the highs and lows of his cigarettes. While the narrator's every bodily sensation and painful memory are probed, no other characters are granted interiority. Just as the perspective of this novel is selfish, its values are worldly: in what purports to be a story about art and injustice, redemption is defined as a lease for a posh address and tuition for a left-leaning prep school. Recommended for collections specializing in African American fiction or Brooklyn local interest. Leora Bersohn, doctoral student, Columbia Univ., New York Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

One man's desperate scramble for cash, shaped into an outsized metaphorical novel on race, class and other American tensions. The 35-year-old narrator of Thomas's debut novel is a man of many talents: He's taught college English, worked construction and played guitar in clubs, all while conquering alcoholism and starting a family in Brooklyn. And as his story begins, all he's got to show for it is bupkus: Both he and his wife are out of work, and he has four days to scare up the five figures necessary to land a new apartment and cover the tuition for his sons' private school. That struggle gives this tale its narrative arc, but Thomas spends much of his time meditating on the past of his hero, who identifies as black (though he also claims Irish and Native American blood) and ponders how much race has both supported and oppressed him. It's an ambitious idea-with some obvious parallels to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man-and the book is filled with some virtuoso passages that expose the subtle degrees of racism in the narrator's world. The relatives of his wife, who is white, are condescending without being aware of it; a day-labor site turns into a proving ground between him and his Latino coworkers; and the climactic scenes on a country-club golf course detail a few unspoken moral compromises that blacks and whites make to get along with one another. It's to Thomas's credit that he takes care to not compress his scenes into simplistic parables about race, but the book's breadth is more sprawling than ambitious. The reader is presented with so many characters-in-laws, parents, friends, drinking buddies, teachers, folks from the neighborhood-that it all ultimately feels more like a fuzzysatellite photo of Brooklyn than a clear portrait of a single person. Thomas is a talented observer of how people interact and what dire financial straits feels like, but he's packed more than a couple books' worth of observations into one. Agent: Eileen Cope/Trident Media Group