Man Gone Down

There's a moment in Michael Thomas's novel Man Gone Down when the hero asks a waitress if he can use the restaurant telephone. For one of the few times in the present action of the novel, the hero--a physically imposing African-American--is regarded with open suspicion. Why doesn't he have a cell phone? For someone who got edgy and agitated when BlackBerry service was disrupted last week, this was a revealing moment. We forget about how much personal technology--cell phones, iPods, ATM cards--functions as a support mechanism for urban life. Technology insulates us, at least partially, from the inconveniences and indignities of life in a major metropolis. Thomas's hero lives entirely free of these devices; consequently, there's a directness of perception in the narrative that recalls the high realism of William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). The directness also allows Thomas to cut through the blandishments of bourgeois life to show with unusual clarity the life of a black man on the verge of losing what few privileges that haven't already slipped away.

But just because he doesn't have a cell phone doesn't mean he doesn't have a support network. His wife, who is white, and his three children have exiled themselves from Brooklyn, leaving him to come up with $12,000 in four days to re-establish his home. Forced to move out of his apartment, the hero (his name is only mentioned once, and it's Michael) stays with a childhood friend, a successful lawyer who is the child of immigrant Italians. On the face of it the hero's descent into despair isn't really that bad: he easily finds work on some construction sites, performs to some acclaim in an amateur hour, drives his friend's Ferrari through Manhattan without getting pulled over, and plays golf at a toney Long Island country club. He's not Dostoevsky's Underground Man or even Richard Wright's Fred Daniels in The Man Who Lived Underground. Instead, the hero is more life a hero from T.S. Eliot, i.e., one who suffers from the buried life, the life not lived. "I was supposed to have been somebody," the hero tells us. "I was full of promise." There are a number of flashbacks to his troubled upbringing, but the most immediate expression of his suffering is his starvation. He refuses or is unable to eat during the four days, his spiritual loss transferred to bodily suffering.

The most powerful passages of the novel combine the Eliotian theme of the buried life and racial identity in contemporary America. At one of the hero's lowest moments he tells us his white wife Claire

had said she loved me--on street corners, in rental cars, on stairways. Claire didn't get it--perhaps still doesn't. Standing before me at the alter, in her vows she said that she loved me, but she hadn't seen--the line of Ham, the line of Brown. I must have appeared to her to have been divorced from time and context--just a man, nothing but a man. Or, perhaps, a formless creature . . . If love was the light and the light revealed all--how couldn't she see me?

This is the question that anyone who is loved must ask him or herself: What is that thing inside me that distinguishes me from everyone else, that is lovable for this person? The next question is even knottier: What is that thing inside me that is black? Or white? When other people look at us and identify us as a particular person, what are they looking at? The most elemental qualities of our identities come from outside us. Only the suffering, the lack and the unrealized, is truly ours.

Fittingly, the novel, which had been so grounded in a sense of place, ends in a non-place: a bus stop in Rhode Island. In one of the most moving endings I've read in a very long time, the hero finds permanence in the transient. I won't give away the ending, but the hero is identified in an odd (and positive) way: by the way he smells. A small, tossed off line about his scent is enough to unravel the hero, and he embraces the life he has before him.