I picked this book up while wandering through the store and was immediately struck by the poetic narrative. I love books that exemplify good writing, and the first few pages of "Man Gone Down" left me hungry for more. My husband asked, "What's it about?" to which I couldn't really answer, but insisted I loved the "voice" of the story.

Well, a couple hundred pages later the "voice" is getting tiresome amidst a plot consisting of wandering around the streets of New York moping, kicking around a friend's house moping, flashbacks consisting of a lot of mopingly not participating in scenes around him and instead drinking and, you guessed it, moping. I found myself heading to bed every night (I do my reading before bed) actually thinking, "Maybe tonight something will happen."

It doesn't. Nothing happens. Except a LOT of moping. Granted, it's beautiful, prosaic moping, but prose isn't a substitute for a story or character development that goes as deep as "moping and black and moping."

I started "Man Gone Down" with high hopes. The plot sounded interesting. The book started off good, but went downhill. Boring. There were moments here and there where things seemed like they would pick up, but didn't. As a whole, this book did not hold my interest.

This first novel beats anything written the same year. I couldn't put it down until I had read it twice. It's one of the most observant pieces in years. You look through the eyes of the narrator and see a world you can't see any other way. Go to a coffee shop, or go to work, or get drunk on a beach--and then read what happens along the way to the end. A sharply structured piece of work, it could teach other aspiring first novelists a few lessons in craftsmanship. MAN GONE DOWN should be on every budding writer's reading list.

I really hated this book. Yes, this guy is down on his luck, but he has so many good things going for him that he doesn't see. I got really tired of him shrugging, not answering questions directed at him., etc. I had to read it to the end just to see if anything happened, which nothing ever did. Awful.

Do you want to spend 400-plus pages with a self-obsessed, self-loathing and incredibly bitter unnamed narrator? It's a tough task but the raw, rambling, stream-of-conscious rant "Man Gone Down" rewards readers who stick it out to the end. Centered around a self-described "black Irish Indian" filled with a "black-iron locomotive" of rage, the story reads more like an extended journal entry or perhaps a bizarre revenge fantasy for real and perceived slights than a conventional novel with a narrative and plot. What set-up there is goes like this: an aspiring but professionally frustrated writer with a hyper-sensitivity to racism spends a few days wandering the streets of New York, trying to work up the courage to return home to his white wife and three kids. He spends most of his time reflecting on his past as a drug-addicted teenager, his present life with a woman whose love he suspects of being insincere, and an unclear future that could involve financial ruin. Writer Michael Thomas jumps back and forth in time with an approach that is best summed up by the narrator himself, who is also working on a novel of individual, seemingly standalone episodes. He writes, "Perhaps I had only disconnected thoughts and anecdotes flaring up in me like bouts of gastritis." Thus, a chapter might start with the narrator going out to dinner, but he never gets there because the story goes off on a tangent about his misadventures growing up in Boston. (From a technical point of view, "The Known World" and "Waterland" do this non-linear dance with more style.) After that, the last third of the novel turns into an unexpected page-turner with a more traditional storyline. And even though the overwhelmingly depressing "Man Gone Down" concludes with a pop-song-worthy imperative to return home to where your loved ones are, it's a happy ending that's earned.

I read this book very slowly, because sometimes it was just too painful. Michael Thomas takes you under the brown skin of a young man separated from his white wife and three children while trying to earn enough money for rent on an apartment and the private school tuition his wife expects. Its stream of conscious narration is very ambitious. Sometimes, he seems to channel Ellison's Invisible Man or Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, but you know it's present-day by the cultural references. I particularly like a few scenes where he interacts with people who rank below him (he buys a beer for a woman strung out on drugs) and above him (there's a great golf outing to a Long Island club.) Each scene and his ruminations on jazz and being bused to a white suburban school build create a complex portrait of the character's interior life.

While his wife, a New England brahmin, knows of his past--his disturbed alcoholic mother is dead, his less-disturbed but passive alcoholic father still lives--she has a kind of blind faith in him that doesn't take much note of the complexities of race and class. The person who comes closest to sharing his experiences and point of view is his one black friend from high school, who is in and out of detox.

But the part of the story that brought me to tears were his memories of the births of his children and the telephone conversations he has with them while he struggles. There were times he almost convinced me that he would leave them, and I think if Thomas had written this book in the sixties, the character would. But he finds another way through his dilemma that has more to do with his growing maturity than with external circumstances, and I closed the book wondering how all the characters survived the winter.