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Title: Man Gone Down

Author: Michael Thomas

Narrator: Beresford Bennett

Format: Unabridged

Length: 16 hrs and 12 mins

Language: English

Release date: 12-29-08

Publisher: Recorded Books

Ratings: 2.5 of 5 out of 14 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Named to the New York Times Book Review's annual 10-best list, this blues-tinged novel tells the story of an unnamed black man estranged from his white wife and their three children. As he struggles to pull money together to provide for his children, his story emerges as a powerful statement about American society.

©2007 Michael Thomas; (P)2008 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic Reviews:

"... drawing on Melville and Ellison, Thomas has written a rhapsodic and piercing post-9/11 lament ..." (Booklist, starred review)

Members Reviews:

All it needs is Sonny Rollins practicing under the Bridge

`It's a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment, especially when the ones that conceived the experiment, the visionaries with sight of the end, with an understanding of the means, are all gone.'

The Narrator of Man Gone Down.

One of the flaws to the Blue Sky view is seldom is there clear instruction on what to do when the storm clouds show up.

Notwithstanding the clearly evident parallels with Ellison's literary classic, Invisible Man, MGD shares some thematic commonalities with Alice Randall's more recent Pushkin and the Queen of Spades. In each case, the reader is introduced to a protagonist, a child of the embryonic stages of the era of diversity, now in adulthood, who is forced by circumstance to enter a phase of self-reflectiveness, and hopefully, self-actualization. While Randall's heroine may exhibit the accoutrements of undeniably greater material success, many of the ethnically unique stresses and encumbrances she experienced, or implied compromises she was forced to make during her developmental years, are suffused in Thomas' work as well.

In sum, the reader of this book is taken on a four day non-linear assessment of a 35 year old African American man's life experience, commencing at the most critical juncture he has yet encountered. As is the case with the overwhelming majority of blacks in this society, his ethnicity is a mosaic however, socially prescribed attribution precluded, as it still does, any universally accepted designation other than one based entirely on phenotype. At face value, that circumstance has not modulated in over 480 years but with the imposition of the legislation of the Civil Rights era, and the inculcation of the prior generation's aspirations, he was placed situations where self-awareness and self-assuredness could not naturally evolve, while any external associations would most often only exacerbate emotional instabilities.

As he stands on the precipice of personal implosion, psychologically imprisoned, socially isolated and occupationally adrift, we eventually learn of all of the experiences and developmental short circuits that led him to near reclusiveness with stewardship of a slowly deteriorating goldfish in the bedroom of an immeasurably more successful acquaintance's six year old son.

While the book is written in stream of consciousness format, I cannot recall a more accessible text of the form. The flow is easy to follow and the transitions seldom seem incongruent. Michael Thomas' style is smooth, melodious and enjoyable, it is the conceptualization that most discomforts. It is a long and often meandering novel yet it grabs and holds one's attention from inception to what, regrettably, I found to be a less than sustaining conclusion.