| Man Gone Down Contributor(s): Thomas, Michael (Author) |
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ISBN: 0802170293 ISBN-13: 9780802170293 Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat OUR PRICE: $12.60 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: December 2006 Annotation: beautifully written, insightful, and devastating first novel, Man Gone Down is about a young black father of three in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream he has bargained on since youth. On the eve of the unnamed narrator's thirty-fifth birthday, he finds himself broke, estranged from his white Boston Brahmin 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 his family afloat, four days to try to make some sense of his life. He's been getting by working construction jobs though he's known on the streets as "the professor," as he was expected to make something out of his life. Alternating between his past--as a child in inner-city Boston, he was bussed to the suburbs as part of the doomed attempts at integration in the 1970s--and the preset in New York City where he is trying mightily to keep his children in private schools, we learn of his mother's abuses, his father's abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is an extraordinary debut. It 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. Michael Thomas's writing recalls some of the great American masters, including Ralph Ellison, but his debut is wholly and distinctly an original. Man Gone Down is a dazzling addition to the literature of and about America today. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Literary |
| Dewey: FIC |
| LCCN: 2006050884 |
| Physical Information: 1.2" H x 5.5" W x 8.2" (0.90 lbs) 432 pages |
| Themes: - Ethnic Orientation - African American - Geographic Orientation - New York - Cultural Region - Mid-Atlantic - Cultural Region - Northeast U.S. |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |