Prometheus 6

I could see it being a fertile field of discussion for mixed-race folk.

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. 

American Dream Deferred
By KAIAMA L. GLOVER

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.