Reviews for Man Gone Down

The average rating for Man Gone Down based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-06-08 00:00:00 Matthew Harris I feel guilty for not being in love with this. Because I should be, right? It's about an educated black writer who somehow went from being the newest test case in Boston's busing system to being a scholarship student at Harvard, and from there to being a drop-out (or kicked-out, as it were) that lands himself at a smaller college in New York, becomes a writer, marries a white woman and fathers three mixed-race children, fails at becoming a writer and suffers the financial/familial penalties there-in. I, similarly, am a black male from an inconsiderable public school background who somehow also wound up in Cambridge (though I did clock in all 4 of my years); I, too, consider myself a writer, though I'm more on the path to becoming an academic (but writers and academics share the same cultural and financial margins, I think); and I've dated white men, though not exclusively -- though I could very well see myself marrying one, and have experienced similar bouts of cultural dissonance as the Ishmael of Michael Thomas' novel with regard to my racial dating preferences. So I can see where the brother is coming from. That, plus the fact that the novel won the IMPAC (a step or two above the Pulitzer, I'd say), was one of the NYT's picks of the year (and they're actually right, sometimes), and was hailed by many critics coast to coast as one of the best racial allegories since Invisible Man. Then again,these days, that latter point simply means that it was a not-terrible novel a) written by a black person, b) longer than 200 pages (remember, IM is an epic), c) written by a male (because black women writers are in the shadow of Beloved, you see). ...All of this to say that I should at least admire the damn thing. And I do. Part of me does. None of my complaints against this novel single out qualities that are "bad" in and of themselves. Sure, the transitions into and out of the ruminations on race and class, the flashbacks, the occasional diatribes could have been more graceful; but I don't expect everyone to smooth over the mechanics of their novels as well as (yes, I'll say it) Toni Morrison, Garcia Marquez, others. Sometimes disorientation is necessary. And not every long/long-ish novel needs to make excuses for its length; I wasn't enthralled by every set piece in Anna Karenina, and Don DeLillo's Underworld could have afforded to sweat off a few pounds (as the Pulitzer and National Book Award judges all seemed to agree.) And, absolutely -- not everything in a novel needs to quote-unquote mean something. Not every narrative needs to be buoyed by symbolism à la The Scarlet Letter, whose rose bush, scaffold, and unfortunate guilt-couture have plagued high schoolers since the 19th century. And yet, and yet, I do expect a novel to feel like it's adding up to something. That's my primary charge, here: that for all of its valuable observations on race, for all of the moments that demonstrate that the novelist "gets it" racially, politically, etc. speaking, there's the lingering sensation that he doesn't have any useful understanding of what novels are, can be, should be, can become. Because, for a novel whose content often seems to resist 'meaning something' (the long set pieces working construction, for example), the text is equally imbued with authorial choices that seem to scream 'Interpret me.' And so you try. Rather, I tried, and much of what I thought I saw turned out to be quite empty. Frankly, the material doesn't really seem to deserve the written genre that contains it, something akin to storing a lobster in a blender or coffee in a tupperware bowl. Something about this novel never seemed to "fit," for me, but I'm not in the business of asserting what form the novel should have taken. (I do suspect that there's a very good editorial somewhere in here, however.) Instead, though, I'll say that I did sort of enjoy it, but most of the time, not really. Not enough.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-10-16 00:00:00 Olegs Vasilenko 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.