It should be some kind of happy ending when, after years of poverty and graft, an aspiring writer publishes their debut novel and it is greeted with acclaim and awards – but that’s not how it happened for Michael Thomas. His 2006 novel Man Gone Down seemed to augur the arrival of a powerful new literary voice, the beginning of a brilliant career. He featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, he won the €100,000 Dublin literary award – one of the most generous prizes in the book world – and he was promoted to assistant professor at Hunter College, New York, where he taught creative writing. But a follow-up would not arrive until now, 20 years later. Thomas’s new memoir, The Broken King, goes some way to explaining what happened in between. It also confirms his formidable talent.
The Broken King is an extraordinary read – deeply personal and intimate, but also expansive and free-ranging, taking in everything from TS Eliot (the title comes from Eliot’s poem Little Gidding) to James Baldwin, Brazilian football and the Rolling Stones. Thomas’s story runs through what he describes as a “perfect storm of conditions”: poverty, parental abandonment, racism, alcoholism, sexual violence, self-sabotage and mental illness. It would be tempting to classify it as some kind of misery memoir, but it is neither bleak nor generic – Thomas is simply too good a writer for that. Reviews in the US have been glowing: “Thomas has rendered beautifully an excruciating existence from which it is impossible to turn away,” raved the author Thomas Chatterton Williams in the New York Times.
