Book Review: ‘Someone Like Us,’ by Dinaw Mengestu

SOMEONE LIKE US, by Dinaw Mengestu

Secrets are the enduring motors that make fiction run: what you aren’t telling me, what I’m keeping from you, what the neighbors know about the love affair. Dinaw Mengestu’s novels are powered by something different but akin: an urge toward privacy that keeps his mercurial characters elusive, even to themselves, but not opaque.

The main character of “All Our Names” (2014) never reveals to his love interest, or to the reader, the name he was born with. Jonas, the dissembling protagonist of Mengestu’s “How to Read the Air” (2010), claims that “whoever can’t see you can’t hurt you.” And Mamush, the reliably unreliable narrator of “Someone Like Us,” never quite secures his slippery grip on reality, on his own motivations, on his own past.

As a driver of plot, personal and emotional slipperiness is a trickier endeavor than old-fashioned secrecy; we can’t rely on the well-timed reveal, the moment when all is made clear, nor enjoy knowing more than the characters while waiting for them to catch up. To appreciate Mengestu’s work, you have to be ready to live in uncertainty, to find any truths obliquely, if at all. If you can accomplish that, the journey is well worth the discomfort.

The concrete facts of “Someone Like Us”: Mamush, a journalist in Paris, is supposed to fly to Washington, D.C., with his wife and young son to spend Christmas in the Virginia suburb where his Ethiopian immigrant mother lives. His ride from the airport will be Samuel, who lives nearby and is most likely Mamush’s unacknowledged father. But Mamush ends up traveling alone — his son has a mysterious medical condition, an unexplained difficulty in movement that eerily echoes his father’s emotional paralysis — and although Mamush makes it to the airport with plenty of time, he manages to miss his flight. This is nothing new; as his wife points out, “You look for ruin. And if you can’t find it, you make it.”

Instead of flying to Washington, Mamush gets himself to Chicago, where he was born. He has a notion to track down Samuel’s criminal record there and reconstruct his own unspoken past, using his journalistic skills. (Mamush writes, as Mengestu himself does, about civil wars in Africa, life in Darfur, refugees in the United States.) By the time Mamush arrives at his mother’s house in Virginia, Samuel has died by suicide just hours earlier.

We toggle between Mamush’s time in Chicago and his desultory time in Virginia, quietly haunting Samuel’s memorial party, looking for the taxi Samuel drove throughout his life in America, searching for and finding a piece of writing Samuel left behind. At times, we’re in neither place, or we’re in both places at once, or we’re in the back of a taxi, taking a ride that never occurred, hearing a conversation that never happened.

Early in the book, we learn about a college assignment in which Mamush had to list and write about important places in his childhood — playgrounds, bedrooms, backyards, classrooms — the sites he returns to again and again in memory and dreams, the “maps of our scattered existence.” But Mamush can come up with only five places. His professor, surprised at the contrast between Mamush’s brief list and his classmates’ endless ones, misses the point when he ascribes this dearth of memories to “an unhappy childhood.”

Mamush, nicknamed Professor OK as a child because he agreed to being toted anywhere, is a fundamentally passive and dreamy character with a circumscribed youth — someone who’d rather invent an elaborate list of fictitious places and memories than explain to this professor that “I didn’t live in the world of happy and unhappy childhoods. We worked. We did what we had to do and never considered other options.”

Any frustration we might experience with Mamush is both validated and mitigated by the frustration the characters around him feel. He doesn’t show up where he says he will; he disappears on benders. “You go to the store and you come back 10 minutes later with nothing,” his wife says. “Half the time I think you have no idea where you are.”

Mamush’s evasiveness parallels Samuel’s. Before he is found dead in his garage, Samuel, a onetime soldier turned refugee, is devastated by how “ordinary” his life in the States has become. “I’m one of a million cabdrivers in this country who speak with an accent,” he tells Mamush. “For a long time, I thought there would be more to it than that, but we came to this country too late in our lives. This was the end, not the beginning.” Nevertheless, Samuel is full of dreams (a cross-country cab network! a thriller novel “but with cabdrivers instead of spies”!). He is even likelier than Mamush to disappear, to find himself in a halfway house, a jail cell or in an altered mental state.

Samuel, like Mamush, prefers to reveal and receive truths through fiction; he’s intent on teaching a young Mamush to lie well, and gives the most direct account of his own life only by pretending it’s a story he read on the internet.

That’s the narrative trick of this entire novel, in fact; you’re going to catch the real only out of the corner of your eye. Don’t bother trying to look at things directly because all you’ll see are the cover stories and lies.

Those of us who love skewed narratives, slanted truths, destabilized fictions love them best not when they’re just tricks to yank the reader along, but when they speak to the instabilities of reality itself, or of a particular life. Mamush might be hapless, but this book is not; it’s meticulously constructed and its genius doesn’t falter even slightly under scrutiny. Its unreliability is earned, and central.

Mengestu’s first three novels found considerable success, but the fact that his work is not even more widely known, not more dominant on the landscape, is the kind of literary injustice that hopefully time, and a few more major awards, and perhaps readers of this review, will rectify. This might not be the novel that earns him broad popular acclaim — your aunt’s book club might wish for a more straightforward narrative, a more forthright narrator — but it’s the book that ought to cement Mengestu’s reputation as a major literary force.

“We are always in more than one place at a time,” Samuel says, in a slight misunderstanding of Mamush’s college assignment. That dual existence is the foundation of so many of Mengestu’s characters, especially those born in one world who inhabit another, who live everywhere and nowhere and somewhere in between. It’s both their curse and their blessing: always a little lost, but at least surviving. What more can we (dare we) wish for?

SOMEONE LIKE US | By Dinaw Mengestu | Knopf | 252 pp. | $28