THE BROKEN KING, by Michael Thomas
In 2006, Michael Thomas cannonballed into the literary world seemingly out of nowhere with an arresting and ambitious debut, “Man Gone Down.” The autobiographical novel landed him on the cover of The New York Times Book Review and eventually secured the prestigious and unusually lucrative International Dublin Literary Award, beating out a slew of better-known authors from Junot Díaz to Philip Roth. And then, just as abruptly as he’d arrived, Thomas all but disappeared.
Over the nearly two decades since, I have often wondered what became of him and what he might do next. Now, at last, there is an answer in the form of an unbearably bleak yet entirely mesmerizing memoir, “The Broken King.” It is a continuation, or a revision, of his novel, one that explains the author’s absence but raises many more questions.
This relentless account of abuse (racial, sexual, masochistic), alcoholism, neurodivergence, family life, madness and artistic self-invention defies any attempt at neat summation. It is a sprawling, unwieldy, at times wildly indulgent beast of a book that a less skilled author may not have even attempted. But with a virtuosic command of language and an eagle eye for punishing detail, Thomas has rendered beautifully an excruciating existence from which it is impossible to turn away.
The youngest of three children, Thomas was born in Boston in 1967 to a Black father he describes as a “new Negro: educated, urbane and comfortable around white people,” and a Black mother he calls a “Southern rural pragmatist,” whose northern migration must have struck her husband as “one that belonged to an earlier generation.”
They live in the childhood home of his father, David, until he abandons the family, just as his own father abandoned him. David Thomas has a rich intellectual life — when Michael sells his novel to Grove, David sighs, “That’s the house of Beckett” — but struggles to provide even for himself. He is a pitiful and sad man who, Thomas obliquely implies, once became aroused with Michael on his lap as a child, “held fast by the Miller High Life in his breath, the stray cigarette embers that found my bare arms, and under me his reluctant desire.”
These are the kinds of astonishing details that Thomas reveals frequently in passing. Early in the book we learn that he was raped at the age of 7 in a public restroom while at summer camp. About the violation, Thomas admits:
I’ve been writing these pages for the better part of a decade, and I’ve abandoned every draft. I’ve been counseled. I have tried convincing myself that the difficult subject matter has prevented me from finishing and publishing my account of my rape. Yes, I’ve wanted to protect my mother and children, but I haven’t been able to talk or write about what happened because it seems immutable. I’ve tried other essays, songs, poetry and fiction, but it’s something I can neither interpret nor render. There’s nothing metaphorical. It is real: sweat, semen and blood.
That is nearly all the commentary Thomas offers on the matter. As decisive as this moment is, his parents do not learn what happened to their quiet, angry son — and perhaps never even allow themselves the chance — until decades later. The event sets Thomas on a course of severe adolescent drinking, cutting, body dysmorphia and devotion to all manner of masochistic exercise regimens and brutal and arbitrary fasting.
“When I wasn’t drunk, I was dissociative,” he writes. “When I wasn’t psychologically and emotionally removed, I was suicidal. When I wasn’t despairing, I was enraged — a rage that could keep me up for days.” Indeed, Thomas has a torturous relationship with rest. He pounds espressos and sprints through city streets at night to the point of delirium. Anything not to lie down. The reader experiences a vicarious physical discomfort and fatigue throbbing from these pages.
He also despises intimacy, not only direct sexual contact but also the mere spectacle of romance. He cannot bear to see people kissing in movies. Somehow, and this remains the crucially underdeveloped part of the story, he gets married in his early 20s to an unrelentingly supportive and understanding white woman named Michaele. This is especially surprising since, in addition to his history of trauma, Thomas evinces a scathing distrust bordering on hatred of whiteness and white people, what some would describe as an Afropessimistic worldview.
“Even growing up in their midst,” he confesses, “I’d never really considered marrying, living with or even dating a white woman. I found no inherent quality to them, nothing special about their visage or carriage.” To this day, they evoke for Thomas “lynching.”
Moreover, Michaele comes from a thoroughly WASP background. “How ill-equipped she and hers were to deal with me,” Thomas explains. “How I’d introduced a permanent racial apparition that would, as long as I was around, haunt their house and point to their ignorance, their exclusionary practices, their privilege, the bigotry in the people, art, institutions and legacies they valued.”
Despite these feelings, Thomas paints gorgeous, unforgettable images of the four mixed children he and Michaele go on to raise together in a dilapidated but appreciating brownstone in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. He is particularly attentive to his firstborn son, Alex, in long and exquisitely rendered scenes of soccer-playing that amount to some of the finest father-son writing I have encountered. Some of the better writing about sports, also.
Which is why it’s such a shame that he refuses to render Michaele in more than two dimensions. Who is this woman so uniquely capable of transcending stereotype? The reader does not get a firm sense of what she looks like or even how she speaks. We must simply take his word that, her whiteness notwithstanding, “I trusted her. She made me believe that there was something in this world, this life, that was, perhaps, if we continued to love each other, within our reach — a condition that countered, outstripped and, more important, outlived fear, rage and sorrow.”
We are trapped completely within Thomas’s head space, which, because of his talent, is at once an expansive and claustrophobic experience. As we increasingly suspect, it is a neurodivergent one also.
“The Broken King” is long. We are hundreds of pages in before Thomas — in a section about his second son, Miles, who is diagnosed with a “nonspecific cognitive disorder” — comes to understand that he himself is on the spectrum. Though Michaele has always known it, this is something no one had ever said to him before, he contends, on account of his race: “Autism was white,” he insists.
In spite of all of Thomas’s afflictions and demons, he perseveres through grinding quasi-poverty (they are house poor, often behind on the mortgage). He works demoralizing jobs in carpentry and demolition. Then, while dealing with his brother’s incarceration and his father’s deteriorating condition, he publishes his novel to life-altering fanfare.
Overnight, the college where he has labored thanklessly as a low-paid adjunct professor triples his salary and tracks him for tenure. He is invited to speak around the country. His neighbors, previously so aloof, regard him with a newfound admiration. It is at this point that the book morphs once more into a harrowing, almost pointillist portrait of severe mental illness. Thomas cracks under the catastrophe of his success, and he recreates the experience with an astonishingly lucid, outright obsessive, vulnerability.
And yet, it would be misleading to end with the impression that “The Broken King” is not a hopeful story. Its very existence, the fact that its harrowing events were witnessed and recorded, amounts to an extraordinary display of human will and resilience. I wish for many more chances to read such displays from Thomas, only with shorter breaks in between.
THE BROKEN KING | By Michael Thomas | Grove | 413 pp. | $28
The post A Life of Rage and Despair, Told in a Memoir Full of Beauty appeared first on New York Times.
