2006 – Grove Press
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A close friend recommended the book, imagining that if I were a writer, I would write a book that sounded like this. Now THAT is a juicy recommend.
I did enjoy the book and I do like the way Thomas writes. I appreciate the unnamed narrator's struggle and thought the ending was very tight.
Apparently there was a lot of hype when this came out five years ago, I just seem to have somehow missed it all. Glad to have read this though.
Amazon description - Evoking the work of great American masters such as Ralph Ellison, but distinctly original, Michael Thomas’ first novel is a beautifully written, insightful, and devastating account of a young black father of three in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream. On the eve of the unnamed narrator’s thirty-fifth birthday, he finds himself broke, estranged from his white Boston Brahmin wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend’s six-year-old child. With only four days before he’s due in to pick up his family, he must make some sense out of his life. Alternating between his past—as an inner city child bused to the suburbs in the 1970’s—and a present where he is trying mightily to keep his children in private schools, we learn of his mother’s abuses, his father’s abandonment, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is an extraordinary debut about what it feels like to be pre-programmed to fail in life—and the urge to escape that sentence.
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