Those remembered: Margret Owens, Cecil Irton Wylde, Cecil C. I. Wylde, Joan Thomas, John Potter, David M. Thomas Jr.—my father.
Charles Beatty Medina—Gracias: you helped build my home.
We will sail someday John Manderson.
“Fare Forward” Jyanto.
Anne Grazino: Great poet—elegant and bright: Go raibh maith agat.
Sally Wylde: You are not Edith. It’s good to see you painting again. Thank you for everything.
Caitlin Wylde: I know you understand.
David, my brother—Peace.
Thank you to my sister, Tracey, who has a knack for producing laptops when needed; who taught me how to tie my shoes.
Mauro Premutico: Molto Grazie al mio amico profondo.
Padraic Michael O’Reilly and Dominic A. Taylor: I could not have done this, nor much of anything else, without you.
Elise Cannon: I’m so glad I went for coffee. You are rare and beautiful. I love you, friend.
Thelma Louise Allen Thomas: I’m sorry for taking the long way “all ‘round Robin Hood’s Barn.” I hope you know I’m proud to be your son.
Cecil Alexander, Miles Fowlkes, and Ella Sweet, I know I don’t say it enough: your father loves you and always will.
MAN GONE
DOWN
Michael Thomas
A BLACK CAT READING GUIDE
Prepared by Barbara Putnam
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
We hope that these discussion questions will enhance your reading group’s exploration of Michael Thomas’s Man Gone Down. They are meant to stimulate discussion, offer new viewpoints, and enrich your enjoyment of the book.
More reading group guides and additional information, including summaries, author tours, and author sites, for other fine Black Cat titles, may be found on our Web site, www.groveatlantic.com.
MAN GONE
DOWN
Michael Thomas
A BLACK CAT READING GUIDE
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Why do we read coming-of-age stories? Think of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Dickens’s Great Expectations, and Fielding’s Tom Jones. All have flawed heroes if not rogues who go on journeys or quests to find themselves and end up forging stronger, wiser selves. How does Man Gone Down reflect these traditions? Do you see similar traits in the protagonists? Energy? Imagination? Big hearts? Raw intelligence? Canniness? Self-delusion? Wry bedrock honesty? What else? Is there even some of Byron’s Don Juan in this narrator?
2. What happens to the American Dream in the novel? What about the Sox and the Cubs (see page 230). How does Daisy Buchanan still tug on the main character? As the narrator remembers years of white, rich girls (his own American dream?), he says, “Keep dreaming, blondie. And it occurs to me not to ask about the dream deferred, because almost everyone knows what it is, on some level, to fail. But what happens to a dream, and yes, a dream, not a desire or hankering or an impulse or a want, but a dream, realized? And yes, I say it again: It is a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment—to learn Latin and Greek and the assassination dates of the martyrs; to toggle between Christ and Keynes, King and Turner, Robinson, Robeson, Ali, Frazier, Foreman; to have a rumbling in the jungle of your black folk soul while a rough coon, its number come up at last, shuffles up from New Orleans to be free. ‘And all shall be well’ when champagne sprays around the home clubhouse in the Olde Towne, character the only currency. Love won. Kingdom Come” (p. 231). How is this passage central to the novel? What is going on between expectations and reality?
3. Can you distinguish between the author and his first-person narrator? Do you find the portrayal completely sympathetic? Are there times when the author seems ironic, wary, or judgmental about his created character? Does Michael Thomas ever allow us to feel contemptuous of him? How are we kept aware of his humanity . . . and our own? Give examples. As a reader, did you sometimes feel chagrined or even appalled by his behavior or reactions? How does the narrator’s own honesty and self-knowledge propel the book to the level of revelation? How is he his own worst and best critic as he ricochets through his four-day journey through New York and memory? Does he ever devolve into self-pity? Do you think he is saved by his sense of humor?
For instance: “When I realize that I’ve left the lucky jeans behind, I have to stop and laugh. I take out the money she paid me and count it: one-fifty—a wash. The cosmos has no sense of humor, so it shouldn’t play jokes on a soul, but I have to laugh again. I start to trot. When I hit the down slope, I break into a run. . . . ‘You’re so good in a crisis,’ Claire used to say. I have to laugh again. The crisis is over. I come off the heaving bridge, turn back once to the electric lights, then into Brooklyn, contemplating the life of an imploded star” (pp. 332–333). Have you noticed in your reading or in your life that laughter can be a corrective as well as a balm?
4. How do his physical symptoms often reflect the narrator’s psychic state? Think of his dyspepsia, gagging, and bile. Are you reminded of Sartre’s Nausea? Is it always a personal disgust or is it sometimes a more general reaction to the state of the world—for African-Americans, for a confused America, for a world in peril?
5. Thomas has written a moral history not only of his narrator without a name—an Everyman—but also a rich tale of America and of people in general. How does the narrator’s own diverse heritage (black, Irish, Native-American) enlarge the meaning of the book?
6. How is the narrator’s extreme energy actually his salvation? “Whatever the disaster of my past life, or the low-calorie days and sleepless nights, I can still run, which is something that Claire and many other people, being neither ex-junkies nor ex-athletes, cannot understand. She would say, when she thought I was angry, ‘You should run,’ as though it would be some cathartic event. Her suggestion would make me angry” (p. 101). What other kinds of physical or intellectual energy sustain him?
7. Do you find that one of the riches of Man Gone Down is that the narrator lives on so many levels, interior as well as “real”? Do we, too, feel we are living multiple lives? At times the heightened senses, physicality, and joy of acuity make us understand what it might be like to be on speed. Discuss the many-faceted main character—his skills and passions, from his world of books to the music that runs in his blood to his Tiger Woods moments. What about his deep fatherhood? His own pure love?
8. What motivates the narrator as writer? In his youth he practiced poetry and thought deep thoughts . . . “and missed out on all the subtleties one could mine a work of art for—to get laid, to get paid. That if you quoted someone, or turned on the right song, with the lights just so, money could change hands or clothes could come off” (p. 99). Then, in Chapter 12, he says, “I am desperate for all the wrong reasons”—the contract providing fame and a silver minivan (p. 277). He slides into paranoia about agents, editors, reviewers, and buyers. Does all this ring true from what you know about writers and the publishing business? At bottom, writing “names things, locates them . . . at least when I’m writing, I can pretend to be involved in some kind of management of my netherworlds” (p. 277). Is that a fair description of creativity in other forms as well? Painting? Composing?
9. What are some of the memorable vignettes? How does Thomas capture people with a fast, deft sketch? Think of the Brooklyn headmistress: “Your mother would’ve been proud” (p. 392), as she pockets the late check. Others?
10. Describe the music that permeates the novel. Some readers have rushed out to find the sixteen or so blues and soul singers that are deep in the narrator’s heart. Are they all black? Does it matter? Remember Miles Davis who “bleeds through his horn” (p. 229)?
11. What makes the book so funny? Often laugh-out-loud funny? Again, thinking of Dickens, Twain, and also Joyce and Cervantes and indeed Shakespeare, is it humanity on the edge of tragedy that sets off the humor? Sometimes slapstick, sometimes gallows, often absurd? “I wonder where Lila and Thomas Strawberry are, and I shiver because I realize I left her urn by the rive
r” (p. 423). A Charlie Chaplin moment?
12. Do you have reservations about any parts of the book? Are you able to hang on when the narrator trips, goes off on a riff? Does it sometimes feel as if you had to have been there? Is Thomas flexing his own narrative muscles, providing verisimilitude? Maybe showing some of the manic highs the narrator will eventually pull away from?
13. In Chapter 18, how is Pincus drawn as both a successful African-American (in the field the narrator “failed” to pursue) and a sad, irritating one? “What about my book you borrowed?”
14. We are told to live mindful of death. Thomas’s protagonist is barraged by instances of memento mori . . . the deaths of his mother, father, friends. He even loses a child to miscarriage. He endures the living death of alcohol and drugs and bears witness to this waste in family and close friends. How does he glean meaning from death? How does he forge an identity from living and observing life on the verge?
15. The narrator takes pride in never cheating—on his wife, particularly. What is the culminating irony in the book? How is the golf game emblematic of the narrator’s game-playing life? How is he in fact playing for his life?
16. How does the imagery of the golf-course woods, indeed an errant wood—for lost golf balls and a place of error—force the main character to confront the grotesquely seminal event of his childhood? (See pages 373–377.) Why does it seem as though he and the reader have arrived at the center of a myth or fable? Does Houston, the young black caddy, serve as a squire or aspirant in this myth? How is he affected, do you suppose, by the resolution of the game? (See pages 378–379.)
17. The main character has earned—and squandered—more talent and opportunities than many can only dream of. Think about what he has lost professionally and socially. Do you think at thirty-five he has a fighting chance of redemption in his public and private life? How is his stunning fall from grace in the woods also a beginning?
18. Would you say that by the end the Everyman-narrator has expanded his definition of what it is to be black into what it is to be human? Talk about this process in the novel. When Pincus pushes him to explain his thinking, he says, “I think I experienced most of what a black man—any man—can experience, late in America—the good and the bad, mostly the bad. And I think it’s useless to blame. I have had, in my whole life, one black friend—he’s now insane. They tried their best, all of them, whether they had the right or the power to do so, to make me assimilate, to ‘sivilize’ me. It never worked. That is the heart of resistance—holding out for the good: That is what I always thought it was to be black, other, or any different title I can paste on myself’ (p. 399).
19. When he says, “I’m a dead man, Gavin” (p. 413), is it fear of retribution from the golfers? End-of-the-road despair about destitution and his lost family? (Does it make us think of Joyce’s story “The Dead”?) And another Irishman, Gavin responds mordantly, “Pfft . . . who isn’t?” (p. 414). If this is the human condition in an existential sense, is Thomas suggesting that it is also the human condition to aspire, to seek redemption, not just to endure but to prevail?
20. “We proclaim love our salvation . . .” It is with this epigraph that Thomas sends the reader off on the epic journey of Man Goes Down. And the envoi quoted before the last chapter is from “Little Gidding,” which we have encountered often in the novel. (The narrator’s doctoral thesis was on Eliot, and Claire read from “Little Gidding” at her father’s funeral, to cite only two of the references.) “In my end is my beginning.” The central character, the Ishmael he claims in jest, has been lost and now he’s found. Is it amazing grace? Was it his descent into the heart of darkness that set him free? Is it third (or fourth) day resurrection? See page 425. “. . . she is that star, its end and its beginning.” How do you feel about the narrator’s proclamation that Claire, a white woman, is his Polaris? Consider this with the understanding of what, in a multicultural sense, the north star symbolizes.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING:
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; Just Above My Head by James Baldwin; Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce; The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. DuBois; The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson; If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes; Walden by Henry David Thoreau; Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot; Moby-Dick by Herman Melville; A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry; Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Tonio Krüger by Thomas Mann; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass; The Dutchman/The Slave by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka); The Duino Elegies by Ranier Maria Rilke; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; The Odyssey by Homer
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