Alaska Employment Law

Time to catch up on a few books. Let me start with the most serious one, Man Gone Down, a difficult, impressive first novel by Michael Thomas. Sometimes compared, quite favorably, to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Thomas’s book is equally attuned to the bleaker sensibilities of T.S. Eliot. This is a book that places demands on the reader, and for the first half of the novel I thought the story was both compelling and slow going, if that’s possible. The plot is complicated, the devices — mostly flashbacks — used to tell the story are complex, especially in the first 200 pages, and just when you think you understand the writer’s main theme, another significant theme emerges. It’s an intimate book, too: I am not sure I have ever read a novel that so much enters the quotidian thoughts of its protagonist that it felt a little bit like spying on him.

It’s summer. The unnamed narrator is an African-American man in his 30s temporarily living in Brooklyn and estranged — we are not quite sure why — from his blue-blooded white wife and three young children (two sons nicknamed “C” and “X” and “my girl”), who are living in Massachusetts with his wife’s emotionally distant and terribly Brahmin mother. As a young man, the narrator showed immense promise, but that promise has become a millstone: he’s not a writer, he’s not a professor, and his best skills, it seems, are as a carpenter and handyman. A perpetual disappointment with a chip on his shoulder, the narrator is nevertheless achingly vulnerable. It’s impossible not to care about him. Broke and staying with a well-heeled lawyer friend, he has a few days to raise enough money to rent an apartment and come up with private school tuition for the kids, in order to get his family to New York. Over the course of the book’s four days, the narrator reveals stories about his abusive mother and mostly absent father, his own alcoholism, his time as a “social experiment,” when he was bused from Boston to schools in Newton, and his friendships with a troubled assortment of young men (mostly) and women.

Stylistically, Thomas is like no other writer I have ever encountered. There is tension and beauty throughout the book. Very little escapes the writer’s attention. A scene towards the end, in which he decides what to do with his mother’s ashes and carries out his plan, is overwhelming. Man Gone Down is of course a book about the lines between black and white and rich and poor, but in the end it’s about being human — and what is remarkable about this book is that Thomas achieves this without losing sight of anything in his life, or ours.