What is the problem with this book? It made the NYTimes ‘Top 10 of the Year’ list— a credential I admit to being easily wooed by — and the praise seems to keep flooding (Kaiama Glover’s glowing review is just the tip; the book also grabbed the Impac Dublin Prize, which brought Thomas a cool $140,000 reward). So what’s the issue?
I think the praise, unfortunately, might have been unwarranted, or at least was too easily given. I will say that for all its faults, this novel does give us a character we can really root for (namely, an unnamed black man who is clearly a surrogate for Thomas himself, and a thinly-veiled one at that, it seems, after reading up on the author’s background). The story, however familiar, is stirring and keeps the pages moving, though not at breakneck speed.
Indeed, there are some wonderful parts to this novel. As a whole, it’s easy to finish the last page, close the book, and forget the many, many clunky moments. It seems like most of the reviewers chose to do that, but personally I could not forget the many bumps along the way. Let’s get into those.
First of all—and this, I suppose, doesn’t need to reflect on the book itself, since it doesn’t change the plot or the emotions or the tone, but I do think it just plain looks bad—my copy (the standard white paperback from Black Cat/Grove Atlantic) was rife with type-Os and editing errors. It was strange, in fact, to be reading a novel and find so very many mistakes. I kind of couldn’t believe it. I’m sure many people could have overlooked these, or seen them and not even minded, but careless errors always leap out at me, and in this case they tinged my reading experience from the start. One common mistake involved erroneous quotation marks, such as on 68 when a character says: “Can you make more than a full-time sitter?” The next line, not a spoken quote, reads: She fumbled.” It happens again further down the page: “Why don’t you? She slammed the table with her hand and went to kick it, too, but she stopped. I fingered my sternum.” The quotation marks after ’sternum’ actually need to go after the question, obviously. Everything after “Why don’t you?” is not spoken dialogue, but narrative description. Someone dropped the ball here.
On 146, we run into an error that seems even more egregious: “I went for long runs along the Charles. It had seemed different when I was a boy… but now, traveling it’s narrow paths afforded me a quiet timelessness.” Oy! Confusing its and it’s is a school-boy mistake. So why did I find it in a sophisticated, award-winning piece of high lit?
One of my favorite mistakes was the following sentence, which some people might be able to stomach but I personally would not allow in a modern novel. This comes when the character goes down to the river at night to send off his mother’s ashes: “I drop the book of matches in, take off my coat and boots, and wade into.” Wait, a period, there, really? Wade into what?
Similarly, on 147, we find a word that isn’t a word: “I drank and waited, wound up hospitalized for exsposure, wandering through the late streets of wintry Cambridge.” How did that first ’s’ make it in there? The problem of a random, incorrect letter being thrown into a word happens again on 217, and at a crucial moment when the narrator is actually describing a misunderstanding about syntax. He recalls when he was an English teacher and liked to read aloud to his students the following quote, “The bone’s prayer to God is death.” However, he explains how, “One day… some student raised his hand” and said that the sentence actually reads, “The bone’s prayer to death its God.” Then the narrator describes wanting to slap the boy because he, as a teacher, was embarrassed to have been reading the quote incorrectly for years. But clearly that “its” in the second iteration is meant to just be “is,” because the point is that he confusedly switched the order of the two terms. Perhaps Atlantic Grove needs to fire their copy editor and hire me instead. Elisabeth Schmitz, Thomas’ editor, has not at all earned the warm “thank you” that Thomas gives her at the end of the book. In fact, I think he might have been better off without her.
But type-Os are the least of Man Gone Down’s issues. And after all, they may not have been Thomas’ fault. I’d give him the benefit of the doubt, except on that sentence about “wading into.” More unfortunate are some of his stylistic devices. One of these devices, one that he favors enormously, repeatedly, and ad nauseam, is that of repeating a line or thought, word-for-word, multiple times, often in the same couple pages. It becomes incredibly, outrageously annoying, and I just can’t believe no reviewer mentioned it.
Thomas establishes many of his gimmicks very early on. The repetition begins on page 9, when the narrator says, “I wonder if I’m too damaged.” He says it again, word-for-word, at the end of the same paragraph. Finally, at the bottom of the page, he riffs for the third time: “I fear, perhaps, that I’m too damaged.” At this point, of course, I did not feel I was picking up on a problem, but rather assumed I had noticed a one-time thing, a powerful phrase repeated for strong emotional effect in this scenario only. However, all effect is lost when Thomas begins to use the same trick over, and over, and over. Did I think three times was a lot? I had seen nothing yet. On 76, the narrator tells us, “It’s a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment.” Twenty pages later—so much that you have to wonder if Thomas figures you will have forgotten already seeing the phrase—he says for a second time, “It’s a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment.” The very next paragraph begins with number three: “It’s a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment.” Do you get the message yet? The character feels he was a social experiment! Do you get it? If not, it’s there a fourth, fifth, and—my god—sixth time, all of the repetitions coming within the next ten pages so that you’re sure to figure out what he’s doing, and to be impressed by it. Other phrases that fall victim to this gag: “I wonder what it feels like, falling out of love” (3x), “I don’t know much about rivers, but I think that I am a strong, brown god” (2x, verbatim, and another time, quoted from a song), and, finally, the granddaddy of all repeated phrases in this book, variations on “teeth sucking.”
This tooth-sucking phenomenon cries for its own separate blog post. As I kept reading on, I had a sinking feeling that it was a bit overused. A quick search through the entire text using Google books yielded just what I had been fearing. Prepare to be horrified (and not even just by the presence of this phrase so many times in one novel, but by the fact that every single over-praising reviewer failed to notice this or mention it).
She shakes her head, slowly, sucks her teeth, like some sex and maternal hybrid. [49]
He sucks his teeth and shakes his head. He’s very slender, jockey sized. [129]
Bing Bing sucks his teeth, though not nearly as loud as KC. [194]
He points at the baker, sucks his teeth, then points vaguely at the first few windows. [194]
“Boy,” teeth suck, “I don’t know how you g’wan clean dat.” [195]
“Yeah, don’t touch anything, she says.” He sucks his teeth again. [195]
KC’s teeth sucking, or the idiot rasping of me endlessly sanding metal. [198]
KC and Bing Bing suck their teeth in unison. [281]
He sucks his teeth and shakes his head once violently. [281]
Feeney turns to go, which draws another teeth suck. [282]
He sucks his teeth and focuses on a point just above my head. [397]
He can’t tell, but he sucks his teeth and shakes his head slowly. [403]
I’m not wrong to be appalled, am I? Could anyone possibly think this isn’t a bit much? The book’s title should be Sucking Teeth! That, or maybe Pulling Teeth, because it started to feel that way. This is worse (though in the same league) as the David Carr potato-metaphor scandal (which you can read about, in all its shock and hilarity, here and here)! By the way, what is this tooth-sucking thing all about, anyway? Is that an action people really perform so often? I don’t think I do it, but even if we give Thomas the benefit of the doubt and assume that it is common, what kind of a guy obsessively notices and chronicles each time a person does it? And how can you hear it, anyway? It happens inside the mouth!
Moving on to the next fiasco, Thomas incessantly inserts song lines into the narrative, always in italics just so you know you’re being educated with jazzy, hip references. The problem is that shoving one line of song lyrics into the middle of a paragraph disrupts the story, and no, not in that Ulysses-esque, artsy, ambitious way of doing it for jarring effect. The narrator talks about winter, and the cold, and then: “The winter wind is blowing strong, my hands ain’t got no gloves…” Or when he thinks about driving in Boston and notes that the roads are mostly straight, he adds, “This is a man’s world…” Always italics, always with the ellipsis, always unnecessary and less effective than Thomas imagined.
Finally, the major connection to a greater, wonderful piece of literature—Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. This, for me, was both a positive and negative current flowing through Man Gone Down. Of course, many have pointed out the similarities, and many seem to find it perfectly fitting, natural, and skillful that Thomas references Ellison’s fabulous work in his book. However, Man Gone Down is less a new novel than it is an homage; in fact, there are so many knowing allusions to Invisible Man (as someone who just read it mere months ago I think it’s possible I caught more of them than most readers would) that at times it felt like Thomas might have decided, “I’m going to take Invisible Man and kind of just re-write it in a modern setting.” Each time that a scene or phrase or action seemed to directly parallel one from Invisible Man I wrote I.M. in the margins, and flipping through my copy, I see that I.M. maybe eight or nine times. As I said, it’s not totally ineffective—in fact it’s probably a smart idea to link your debut novel to such a towering, important, and readable classic—but he might be stretching it too far. Specifically, there is a scene reminiscent of when Ellison’s Invisible Man gets booted from college, a scene similar to when the Invisible Man walks through the streets of New York examining people’s faces, and also numerous mentions of light and dark and isolation (obviously these are themes not just particular to Ellison’s writing, but relating to race in general, and they’re very relevant here, I know that), and finally an obvious imitation is Thomas’ choice to not give his protagonist a name. Yet the most major Invisible Man reference of all comes when the hero goes golfing at a fancy country club with some white men, and he’s about to swing and remarks, “I hear them pleading, exhorting me to hit the ball straight and long, just as I hear the founder rasping from his canvas on the greak oak wall— “Swing, nigger, swing!” —and his brothers hissing in unison, “Amen.” This mention of “the founder;” who could this be? I suppose he means the founder of the country club, but that phrasing, that mentioning of “the founder” without any qualifier like “the founder of…” can only be a conscious reference to the “founder” figure in Invisible Man, who plays a central role and constantly looms over the Invisible Man’s actions and struggles, judging him, making him question his path.
Anyway, I always like to get “the bad” over with first (though of course in this review that ended up being a bulky list) so that we can get to “the good.” And this book does have some wonderful elements to it. Specifically, even though I didn’t like his writing style, there were some individual scenes and passages that blew my mind. First of all, during the chapter called “Big Nig,” the main character, after being called a “big nig” by a clumsy white guy (who gets his face punched in for it, this being another great scene in the book) begins writing his own fiction on napkins in a café. He scribbles down these short scenes (calling them “notes for a novella”) about a character named Big Nig (reminds us of Bigger Thomas from Native Son). These small scenes, which almost function like a book inside a book (the main character, writing them, already being a version of Thomas himself, now also becomes a writer, like Thomas) are just wonderful, and I’d even venture to say that the writing is better than in the rest of the book, which begs the question of why Thomas saved his best stuff for quick, italicized scenes that are meant to be hurriedly jotted down by his character. Here’s a great one: “Thursday afternoon we limp to bars after work. Happy—seemingly easy and free. Then Friday breath and bile from protracted happy hours; more drinking perhaps or perhaps sleep. And you know, in your mind, the dream of weekend empire are all lies.” Wow; pitch-perfect prose. It continues to be gripping, more compulsively readable, when the ‘Big Nig’ story begins on the same page: “Big Nig was a schizophrenic, that’s what he was told. So one day he stopped taking his medication. Nothing happened. So he went out, to be himself—walking streets that seemed familiar and strange at the same time.” Very, very simple, but compelling. Had Thomas followed this more straightforward, bare-bones style for the body of the actual novel (rather than the repetition of phrases, song references and lyrics, and constant flights of fancy into long, abstract reveries), it may have been a different (better) read.
The other seriously excellent scene, and I would argue the crowning achievement of this book, comes at the very end and lasts for a good fifteen pages. It takes place at a fancy golf course, to which the hero is dragged by his friend Marco, to play eighteen holes with three combative white guys. The entire day is described so well, and is so incredibly entertaining and surprising, it seems as though from a different book. Here’s just a taste: “I take the five iron I’ve been fondling and climb up to the tee. They try not to stare, but they do. It must looks ridiculous—at least unusual… although Marco is my friend, I still haven’t dismissed the notion that this is all a setup… I wonder if they can see my legs shaking. Even the black kid is watching, and I can’t help but think that he has something invested in this moment, too—from a perverse claim to caddy shack bragging rights to the complete emancipation of his people.” He’s so nervous, and when he finally does take his first swing on hole one, and it goes extremely well, we suddenly get this surprising, moving gem: “Buster says nothing. Both caddies grin stupidly. The black one snaps out of it and reaches for my club. I wave him off because I can tell I’m about to cry… My people were on that ball.” This is great stuff.
But as I said, moments like those are few and far between. On page 252, in fact (just over halfway through the book) I see that I had written to myself or to some future borrower of my copy, “starting to get very tired of this story right about here.” The golf chapter, if anything, felt like a reward (at last!) at the end of the book for making it this far, surviving 370 pages of tedium and repetition to suddenly reach a surprisingly compelling, well-narrated story of a dramatic, tense golf outing. I have to wonder if the critical success of Man Gone Down has been yet another case of overly-generous reviewers (see the fabulous NYTimes article from last year about there being too many sparkling reviews given these days, I can’t find the link), or if maybe I simply missed something wonderful here. I suppose I’ll never be sure, but I can say I’m relieved to be finished with it. I don’t regret picking it up, though.
Hey Bob, Shut the Fuck Up!
Bob, We NEVER liked you. Please don’t visit again. If you are sick of our success, stay the fuck away and shut off ESPN. Better yet move to Kansas City, Oakland, Washington or another “small city” and wallow in misery with them. You are right, sports go in cycles, and we will suck again at some point, which makes it even more important to revel in our success while it lasts. So, Bob, either get on the party bus or don’t bitch about getting run over by it when you visit. Oh, and again…. Fuck you.