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Tarfumes.com - Man Gone Down: A Novel
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List Price: $14.00
Our Price: $6.49
Your Save: $ 7.51 ( 54% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Grove Press, Black Cat
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Grove Press, Black Cat
Manufacturer: Grove Press, Black Cat
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 432
Publication Date: 2006-12-07
Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
Studio: Grove Press, Black Cat
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Editorial Reviews:
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Evoking the work of great American masters such as Ralph Ellison, but distinctly original, Michael Thomas’ first novel is a beautifully written, insightful, and devastating account of a young black father of three in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream. On the eve of the unnamed narrator’s thirty-fifth birthday, he finds himself broke, estranged from his white Boston Brahmin wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend’s six-year-old child. With only four days before he’s due in to pick up his family, he must make some sense out of his life. Alternating between his past—as an inner city child bused to the suburbs in the 1970’s—and a present where he is trying mightily to keep his children in private schools, we learn of his mother’s abuses, his father’s abandonment, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is an extraordinary debut about what it feels like to be pre-programmed to fail in life—and the urge to escape that sentence.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent writing, but...
Comment: I picked this book up while wandering through the store and was immediately struck by the poetic narrative. I love books that exemplify good writing, and the first few pages of "Man Gone Down" left me hungry for more. My husband asked, "What's it about?" to which I couldn't really answer, but insisted I loved the "voice" of the story.
Well, a couple hundred pages later the "voice" is getting tiresome amidst a plot consisting of wandering around the streets of New York moping, kicking around a friend's house moping, flashbacks consisting of a lot of mopingly not participating in scenes around him and instead drinking and, you guessed it, moping. I found myself heading to bed every night (I do my reading before bed) actually thinking, "Maybe tonight something will happen."
It doesn't. Nothing happens. Except a LOT of moping. Granted, it's beautiful, prosaic moping, but prose isn't a substitute for a story or character development that goes as deep as "moping and black and moping."
Customer Rating:
Summary: Put me to sleep
Comment: I started "Man Gone Down" with high hopes. The plot sounded interesting. The book started off good, but went downhill. Boring. There were moments here and there where things seemed like they would pick up, but didn't. As a whole, this book did not hold my interest.
Customer Rating:
Summary: read it twice, at least
Comment: This first novel beats anything written the same year. I couldn't put it down until I had read it twice. It's one of the most observant pieces in years. You look through the eyes of the narrator and see a world you can't see any other way. Go to a coffee shop, or go to work, or get drunk on a beach--and then read what happens along the way to the end. A sharply structured piece of work, it could teach other aspiring first novelists a few lessons in craftsmanship. MAN GONE DOWN should be on every budding writer's reading list.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Book Gone Down
Comment: I really hated this book. Yes, this guy is down on his luck, but he has so many good things going for him that he doesn't see. I got really tired of him shrugging, not answering questions directed at him., etc. I had to read it to the end just to see if anything happened, which nothing ever did. Awful.
Customer Rating:
Summary: TOUGH BUT REWARDING READ
Comment: Do you want to spend 400-plus pages with a self-obsessed, self-loathing and incredibly bitter unnamed narrator? It's a tough task but the raw, rambling, stream-of-conscious rant "Man Gone Down" rewards readers who stick it out to the end. Centered around a self-described "black Irish Indian" filled with a "black-iron locomotive" of rage, the story reads more like an extended journal entry or perhaps a bizarre revenge fantasy for real and perceived slights than a conventional novel with a narrative and plot. What set-up there is goes like this: an aspiring but professionally frustrated writer with a hyper-sensitivity to racism spends a few days wandering the streets of New York, trying to work up the courage to return home to his white wife and three kids. He spends most of his time reflecting on his past as a drug-addicted teenager, his present life with a woman whose love he suspects of being insincere, and an unclear future that could involve financial ruin. Writer Michael Thomas jumps back and forth in time with an approach that is best summed up by the narrator himself, who is also working on a novel of individual, seemingly standalone episodes. He writes, "Perhaps I had only disconnected thoughts and anecdotes flaring up in me like bouts of gastritis." Thus, a chapter might start with the narrator going out to dinner, but he never gets there because the story goes off on a tangent about his misadventures growing up in Boston. (From a technical point of view, "The Known World" and "Waterland" do this non-linear dance with more style.) After that, the last third of the novel turns into an unexpected page-turner with a more traditional storyline. And even though the overwhelmingly depressing "Man Gone Down" concludes with a pop-song-worthy imperative to return home to where your loved ones are, it's a happy ending that's earned.
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