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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.
Winner of the 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Olegs Vasilenko
reviewed Man Gone Down on October 16, 2009
Man Gone Down
I was really excited to read this book after hearing that he upset all of the other authors and won the Dublin prize for literature. Not just that, but the topic (a Black man in the inner city searches his soul) was incredibly appealing to me. However, the book was a huge disappointment or maybe it shows a lot of promise and it's a wonderful first novel for an up and coming author.
I thought it was very self-indulgent and circular. Nothing happens, which is fine if there is some internal development, but the main character (whom I can only imagine is the author himself) is so full of race and class baggage that he really cannot see his situation honestly. And his baggage isn't even unique. All good literature is about someone's inner angst and it's usually the voice of the majority so it's nice to hear different voices, but this still struck me as a voice from inside academia. A voice that is not so much his own but the typical "black man in the inner city" voice that you are supposed to embody. And it struck me as stale and dishonest.
He beat out Junot Diaz to the prize and I think that was a mistake. Diaz is much more original and is really able to get out of academia to tell a quirky story outside the mainstream.
Thomas could not get out of his angst throughout the entire story so it was a frustrating read.
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