The Maanga

Uneven prose is difficult to judge.

Michael Thomas understands this well enough to use it as a narrative technique in Man Gone Down. Its good parts being good makes the reader extend benefits of bad prose to the possibly schizophrenic narrator. The book is filled with such vanity stemming from the author’s hubris that I was fondly reminded of this blog. Even the slightest hint at being aware of one’s own limits and attempting to use it as a technique to move forward is charming in any setting. [1]

The narrator of Man Gone Down is an average man. He is black. Or brown, as he calls himself. He is vain, whines all the time and has a sense of victim-hood that makes him spew conspiracy theories like  many other black men. He is Barrack Obama with the negro dialect he chooses; without the ambition or a black wife.

Postmodern construct juxtaposed with racial identity does make for an interesting clash.  However there is the risk of it turning cliched and mediocre — which is where Michael Thomas turns the narrative on its head. He employs a technique where the younger and non-sober narrator living as a social experiment that precedes postmodernism is articulate, violent, lazy and confused. Better still the souring of the dream in that setting is still an idea and not a condition. Which makes for riveting prose within that construct. And Thomas handles the trap of the next layer by letting the narrator be the ennui that his prose threatens to become (and does). That’s either lame or brilliant. Or neither. Depending on which side of Maanga you are on.

[1] - Maybe I am biased.