American Dream Deferred
By KAIAMA L. GLOVER
MAN GONE DOWN
Available in Ryde Library. You can place a reservation online.
By Michael Thomas.
431 pp. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic. Paperback.
Call him Ishmael. It’s one of a few placeholders the protagonist of Michael Thomas’s first novel, “Man Gone Down,” offers up as a clue to his identity. It doesn’t matter if that’s really his name, though, because like Melville’s enlightened nonhero, this man does not expect to survive the journey. He has long known himself lost to this world.
Thomas gives him his story to tell in the first person, allowing his hero more than 400 pages to narrate the events of four days and the troubled lifetime that’s led up to them. A Boston-bred black man living in Brooklyn and struggling to write while supporting his blue-blooded white wife and their three children, Thomas’s narrator is on the verge of losing it all. Completely broke and temporarily residing in the bedroom of a friend’s child, he must come up with more than $12,000 in these four days — enough money to rent an apartment, pay tuition at his children’s private school and rescue his motley crew from their Brahmin grandmother’s New England home, where they’ve been exiled for the summer. “Man Gone Down” is the story of this and other near impossibilities.
Though the novel ostensibly recounts the events of four desperate days in New York, it extends far beyond these boundaries of time and space. In seamlessly integrated flashbacks, the narrator recalls the trauma of his 1970s childhood as a “social experiment,” bused to the affluent suburbs of Boston from the city. He then uses these forays into the too-present past as springboards from which to investigate the fragmented histories of his abusive mother and perpetually absent father — so much “collateral damage of the diaspora.” From there, flash forward to the tragedies of his more recent history: debilitating alcoholism, outbursts of violence while at Harvard, dreams deferred, if not extinguished altogether.
One of the bigger questions posed by the novel is how to pursue the American and other dreams when the realities of race stand so mightily in the way. Indeed, just how does one negotiate a color line that runs smack through the middle of a family? The narrator’s semi-ironic refrain, borrowed from Lorraine Hansberry, “Look what the new world hath wrought,” wears a bit thin, but his less self-conscious reflections on the so-called race question — as it affects his kids — are powerful and moving. Going a step beyond the normal parental fascination with their children’s genotype and phenotype, he acknowledges his heightened attention to the provenance of specific features: his younger son looks “exactly like” him “except he’s white. He has bright blue-gray eyes that at times fade to green. ... In the summer he’s blond and bronze — colored. He looks like a tan elf on steroids.” Barely named products of his transgressive partnership (his sons are called “C” and “X,” his daughter referred to only as “my girl”), the children are preposterous hybrids — “the wreckage of miscegenation” — at war with a nation’s desired purity. His well-founded fears for them expose the lie of America’s melting-pot fantasy.
Here he is on his older son: “I thought, when he was born, that his eyes would be closed. I didn’t know if he’d be sleeping or screaming, but that his eyes would be closed. They weren’t. They were big, almond shaped and copper — almost like mine. He stared at me. I gave him a knuckle and he gummed it — still staring. He saw everything about me: the chicken pox scar on my forehead, the keloid scar beside it, the absent-minded boozy cigarette burn my father had given me on my stomach. Insults and epithets that had been thrown like bricks out of car windows or spat like poison darts from junior high locker rows. Words and threats, which at the time they’d been uttered, hadn’t seemed to cause me any injury because they’d not been strong enough or because they’d simply missed. But holding him, the long skinny boy with the shock of dark hair and the dusky newborn skin, I realized that I had been hit by all of them and that they still hurt. My boy was silent, but I shushed him anyway — long and soft — and I promised him that I would never let them do to him what had been done to me. He would be safe with me.”
In his critique of American society, Thomas leans heavily on “Invisible Man,” of course, but also on T. S. Eliot, in ways both acknowledged and unacknowledged. There is more than a touch of Prufrock’s nihilism: the profound isolation of an elevated spirit ill suited to the baseness of the wider world; the despair of the hobbled stallion obliged to run the rat race. Fighting a fate preordained as much by his genes as by his country, Thomas’s narrator is a man perpetually at risk. His tormented psyche subtly reveals how such ostensibly innocent American pastimes as baseball and golf can become vicious backdrops to the disillusionment of the marginal, and how kindness can be poison to those on whom it is imposed — to the point where the refusal of gifts carelessly offered becomes a question of self-preservation. Whether or not capitalism is conducive to happiness, Thomas is adamant that the rich are truly better off than the poor — not because they have more stuff, but because they are spared the indignity of perpetually having a hand out. Of always asking.
But while in many ways pessimistic, “Man Gone Down” also relies on the Eliot of “Four Quartets.” There are flashes of hope throughout, and the narrator is ultimately kept buoyant by love’s promise. Indeed, he finds love even where it shouldn’t be; for example, in the calm after a particularly vicious beating (with an extension cord) at his mother’s hands: “And the places on my body where she’d whipped buzzed and seemed to rise with heat. It didn’t hurt. And I knew from her face, the crazy, random face gone soft and quiet that there was, shot through the both of us and through the air, love. There was light in that little room. It moved through me, warmer than my blood. It was in her. It was all around us — the sink, the table, the counter. Her face seemed to glow from a place I couldn’t discern. Love. And it wasn’t so particular as her love for me or mine for her; it seemed to have always been there, and through our rawness we both felt it — balm on wounds.” In a world of total dysfunction, healing plucked from the ether seems to be enough.
Thomas takes a risk in his choice of first-person narration. The “I” is necessarily solipsistic, and this “I” has a massive chip on his shoulder. He has a right to carry it, yes, as he bears the weight of what seems like absolutely everything without buckling. But he indulges at times in an arrogant self-pity that can undermine sympathy for his plight. Ashamed almost of joy, he tightropes the line between dignified abnegation and masochism — he refuses free food though he’s starving, revels in the denial of simple pleasures, takes sullen pride in being disliked by those in a position to help him. That said, this “I” also makes himself vulnerable. He is a hero — a writer — constantly in dialogue with himself, admitting his fear of the machine as he feeds it. While often showing self-righteous disdain for the mediocre world that ignores his worth, he consistently puts himself out there to be judged as well — exposing his own pettiness, his own limitations as a father, husband, son, friend, man.
“Man Gone Down” might have been shorter. The scope of Thomas’s project is prodigious, though, and the end result is an impressive success. He has an exceptional eye for detail, and the poetry of his descriptive digressions — “the heaving surface of the water is what the night sky should be — moving and wild, wavering reflections of buildings on both sides, dark and bright, like thin, shimmering clouds” — provides some respite from the knowledge that the city he loves can truly crush a man’s spirit. A Boston-bred African-American writer who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their three children, Thomas seems to have fully embraced the “write what you know” ethos. And what he knows is how the odds are stacked in America. He knows the unlikelihood of successful black fatherhood. He knows that things are set up to keep the Other poor and the poor in their place. More than anything else, he knows how little but also — fortunately — how much it can take to bring a man down.
Kaiama L. Glover is a professor of French literature at Barnard College.
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