An Addition for Your American Lit. Syllabus

Michael Thomas – Man Gone Down

A few days before leaving for Rome at the end of June, I saw the news that Michael Thomas had been awarded the Impac Dublin Prize in a terrific New York Times article by a fine journalist, Larry Rother. I headed straightaway to The Toadstool in Peterborough and packed a copy. On the plane from Boston to Rome and in our cool and welcoming room at  the Albergo del Senato after daylong touring and eating, I devoured his book in our four days in Rome. The novel itself covers a period of four frenetic days in the life of an extremely burdened man, a man living in  spheres of blackness and whiteness, sobriety and dependence, wealth and poverty, white collar and blue collar… the list is a litany of modern man in so many ways.

The work itself flows energetically and engaged me in a most visceral way. Thomas writes intimately one moment and then paints broad brushstrokes of details that allow the reader breathing space needed to digest, process and survive the dialogue. And like other works dealing with taboo topics, Thomas makes masterful use of humor as a means to keep us working on the novel. One view of this book is through an African-American lens, but a more catholic readership will find much to consider in Man Gone Down.

This book belongs on high school reading lists for a number of reasons, but I am skeptical that we will see it widely taught. But if we are trying to connect our secondary school readers to the importance of the novel, this contemporary offering provides a world that they inhabit and have considerable background knowledge about. And as many reviewers have observed, Thomas is a literary writer and his work offers connections into works by many authors resident in the canon of American literature: think Ellison, Twain, Diaz, Cather and Alvarez to name just a few!