Very soon into reading Man Gone Down, the work by debut novelist Michael Thomas that earned him the IMPAC prize this year, I realized I was reading one of those literary novels I used to love in the sixties and seventies: a huge, meandering, poetic human epic. We don’t get many of them any more – these days even the most ‘artistic’ writer tries to maintain a tight narrative brew. Not Thomas. His unnamed hero in Man Gone Down, a black borne in the post-MLK days of high hopes, flails through four days in New York with a simple yet unattainable goal: come up with enough money to save the apartment and private school placement of his family. With his white wife and three children having fled to the mother-in-law’s, we follow the protagonist as he looks for work, jogs across the Brooklyn Bridge, and recalls the chaos of a life marked by early alcoholism, broken writer’s dreams, poverty and abandonment.
I tell you, Man Gone Down should not work. It flies all over the place, endlessly digresses and dwells on the smallest of moments in the past. The plot setup is impossible and the resolution would flounder in less capable hands. Yet Thomas has wrought a minor masterpiece and the key is his prose, the kind of elliptic yet tough writing that, once you absorb its rhythms, demands close attention. We eventually learn everything there is to know about the beaten-down narrator. And, because the quandary of being part of the ‘promised generation’ of post-integration blacks is the protagonist’s obsession, we catch a glimpse into a side of America we rarely see. Both Brooklyn and childhood Boston come vibrantly alive. This is humane and blissful ‘big idea’ fiction at its best.