SOMEONE LIKE US
DINAW MENGESTU
Alfred A. Knopf
$28.00 hardcover, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: After abandoning his once promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Helen-a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love, but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Helen on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington DC that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush's stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel,the larger-than-life father-figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage.
With Helen and their two-year old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel's life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breath-taking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: I am a very, very white old man. I experience none of what Mamush does, or expects to, on a daily personal basis. My Young Gentleman Caller is half-black (he prefers lowercase to uppercase "Black"). There are times I am utterly oblivious to what that idiotic blood quantum theory of human identity means because I get none of it. What I *do* get is profiled, when traveling, as an American...some indefinable something about me is ineradicable, and inescapably American. Among anti-semites I am always assumed to be a Jew. (Among Jews as well, which can get awkward.) As a gay man, and an old one, I'm often seen as not queer enough, or just a bit too queer. Can't win for losin'.
So when I read Author Mengestu's books, I am not just pruriently peeping in on his characters' struggles with identity and its ramifications.
The great strength of Author Mengestu is his lovely language. One of my all-time favorite aperçus of his is from How to Read the Air: "There is nothing so easily remade as our definitions of ourselves." (Note to self: Why haven't we reviewed that one?) This book, too, is full of meaty thoughts on identity, on the mutability of selfhood, on the complexity of being alive in an interwoven web of love and fear and distrust, trying to spin new threads as old ones fray, of making the effort to stick yourself to the ones you thought you wanted to escape. The way webs form...from the center outward, directed by a design and made for a purpose...is, however, the opposite of that other great center-driven natural structure: the hurricane. These form when a depression becomes so empty that everything around it is drawn in to fill its vacant space in the atmosphere. Mamush, with the best of intentions, is a hurricane. “You’re like a donut. There’s a hole in the middle, where something solid should be,” says his wife.
He sticks to nothing, nothing sticks to him. His deep and abiding depression formed in his deeply uprooted "family." His mother and father escaped imploding Ethiopia, and in a truly terrible series of bad decisions, engendered their child Mamush. Neither, though they are friends, wants to raise a child with the other. Mamush has the ordinary single-mother experience of childhood with all its spaces and silences and absences. His father would've been absent no matter what because he is a man on a mission to help other Ethiopian immigrants starting a taxi business to employ them in the US. Tgat makes him professionally unrooted, always in motion, at the mercy of those around him, subject to their moods and attitudes in service of making a living. Mamush is his father's son. He abandons a job as a journalist...someone who observes from the sidelines...to run away from the ever-darkening US. It's the way these men live. He starts a family in France, which honestly sounds like one of the worst ideas anyone ever had. That, unsurprisingly, just presses his depression even lower down: his son is disabled, a hard, hard road for the best prepared parent. Predictably, it's a terrible stressor for Mamush. At his mother's summons to come home to DC and help her figure out where his father has got to, he's outta there leaving son and wife to struggle along without him.
It's deeply telling that he misses his plane. It's even more telling that he, on a whim with no forethought, then switches his ticket from DC to Chicago. It wasn't just a whim, really, as his parents had lived with him in Chicago before settling in DC. His unmooring from his plans, from his family, from his career, is all in service of a Quest. Who doesn't love a Quest? He's so turbulent, such a low-pressure spot in his own life, that he's attracting chaos at such a huge rate he must find a way to fill himself from the center outward or succumb to that destructive chaos.
A man in search of a center, a man whose essence is unquiet and kinetic, who now wants something he's never had and has no tools in his kit to create, is a danger to himself and others until he finds the thing that can act as solid ground. Standing still is only possible when there's solid ground under you. Then the hole formed so early in life, made from the same stuff as the edges are, is the small nugget of solidity he can stand on. From this small, awkwardly shaped piece, a center is formed, and the spinning of that web of intent, design, and adhesion can begin.
This is when Mamush says to his father: “There isn’t one story. Things start and end abruptly. Some pages are just a single paragraph. I don’t always understand who’s speaking or what’s happening. If what you’ve written is fact or fiction.”
Homecoming, homegoing, home is now within reach. It is a beautiful moment in a book that, for almost half its length, made me want to slap the hell out of Mamush, out of his parents, and maybe most of all his idiot wife who had a child with this deeply unready man. All comes out well, or at least "well" is finally in sight, for Mamush. Guaranteed? No. Delivered? Not really. But visible at last.
I think Dinaw Mengestu deserves a stonking medal for taking me on this journey that irked and annoyed me, but lured me on with his usual glorious phrasemaking music, then delivered me to an ending I could both believe completely and feel satisfied with. Kudos to you, sir.
