Our protagonist runs along the streets of New York and worries: about his bills, his unfulfilled potential, his family responsibilities. He crosses the Brooklyn Bridge and we follow, down one street and up the next, as with him, we experience poverty and human suffering in graphic and smelly detail.
With striking parallels to author Michael Thomas, our narrator is of mixed race, black, native American and white (Irish). He's a brilliant scholar, a construction labourer, a former college athlete, a Harvard dropout, a former teacher of freshman English, a dry alcoholic, a father of three.
As we run with him, we see through his eyes another jogger, a car accident, a woman outside a liquor store, desperate for a beer. When our man breaks his last ten to buy one we hold our breath. Don't drink that! Sigh with relief when he gives it to her.
This narrator has enough on his mind, trying to earn money for urgent bills, looking for a home so his wife and kids can come back from staying with her mother, so he can have a home again, instead of staying in the summer-vacated room of a wealthy friend's kid.
Then there's 911 to add to the growing burden of his thoughts. Why, he wonders, do people reductively dichotomize, why do "the leaders call to the dead...say the dead call out for retribution...Genocide wrapped in some rationalization that someone is owed something. The continued body count, millenia old and miles long."
He also reflects on growing up post-King, remembering misfit childhood friends who have gone off the rails and recalling the "disastrous" attempt at bussing. In a beautiful and elegiac tone, he meditates on his life, "It's a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment, especially when...the visionaries are all gone. No more DuBois. Nor more Locke. No more Gandhi. No more King." He doesn't blame the liberals. But he can't reach them, nor they him.
In the world inhabited by this complex and tragic man, we are told, talent and potential are irrelevant in the end, and the only thing that matters is winning big. No doubt this view is influenced by his combined sense of responsibility and failure, of being middle-aged and not living up to some standard he had set for himself. And we grieve with him for his father, who "groans from the crypt of memory."
Our man feels helpless to meet the needs of his children, or to bridge the gap of history and experience between himself and his white patrician wife. Unlike her husband, he tells us, Claire is not vexed by the presence of other people, "even those she dislikes...she has the ability to make them feel good--when she smiles at them, gives them her approval with all that Anglican highness."
This powerful book has huge vision, beautifully drawn characters, profound human tragedy, even flashes of humour, as when the girl at Starbuck's slides over his large black "with six ice cubes dropped in on top to take the coffee out of the lawsuit temperature range."
It was published by Grove/Atlantic Press in 2007 in their Black Cat imprint, and named as one of the year's ten best by the New York Times Book Review. In 2009 it won the Impac Dublin Literary Award.
According to Larry Rochter's interview at the time that prize was announced, Thomas had other books planned. I for one can hardly wait to read more of his work.
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