Man Gone Down (59 page)

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 river” (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.

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