Man Gone Down is a novel about a young black father of three in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream he has bargained on since youth.<BR>On the eve of the unnamed narrator's thirty-fifth birthday, he finds himself broke, estranged from his white wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend's six-year-old child. He has four days before he's due in Boston to pick up his family, four days to try to make some sense of his life. He's been trying to stay afloat by working construction jobs, though he's known on the streets as "the professor," as he was expected to make something out of his life.<BR>Alternating between his past - as a child in inner city Boston he was bussed to the suburbs as part of the doomed attempts at integration in the 1970s - and the present in New York City where he is trying mightily to keep his children in private schools, we learn of his mother's abuses, his father's abandonment, alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America.