SOMEONE LIKE US, a title that says so much more after you've read the book (which you should!)

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.

MOTHER OF A MACHINE GUN, a mother of a wallop in under 100pp

MOTHER OF A MACHINE GUN
MICHAEL SEIDLINGER
Lazy Fascist Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.95 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: What happens when a woman gives birth to a machine gun?

"Mother has something else to say but music won’t stop music is here to stay. For ‘music’, read language. In this headlong tumble of a novella, we see not only an (unhinged/possibly murderous) Mother searching for her (autistic/possibly murderous) son, but also we see language itself, banged up and tripping, a bleeding anatomy of Biblical, crime show, tabloid, service industry phrases joined into a body, hurtling towards impact, and wondering where its human inmates are."

—Joyelle McSweeney, author of Salamandrine: 8 Gothics

My Review: McSweeney's blurb strikes the perfect tone for this novella. Perfect, and no one really can do any better in summing up a work that clearly fell out of Seidlinger's head, sharp-edged and lethally shaped, whole and entire.

I've read three of Seidlinger's books, this being the second of them and The Fun We've Had being the first. I'm getting a picture here. A young man determinedly deconstructing identity. A tyro artist making big bold gestures in small constrained spaces. A soul in search of a mate.

So that's the art.

Now the craft: Every writer needs a trope. Seidlinger's is musical brevity. He'd be called a poet if he made less sense. It's to your taste or it's not, but it's a technique that feels to me organically arrived at, a natural result of being part of the zeitgeist this youth has sucked in with his breath and taken in with his mental food.

The short and virtually unpunctuated sentences of the piece aren't visually appealing to me. It looks like poetry, not a novel, when there is so much white space on a page, when the entire novella is only 90pp, when the one-line paragraphs are dotted hither and thither. I'm an older person, schooled in an older-still tradition of reading long, windy (both pronunciations and meanings) sentences and paragraphs and pages. I don't take to, appreciate, this technique naturally.

So I read it aloud. The dog doesn't much care. She pays attention to me while it suits her and then goes to sleep. Meanwhile the human is making noise, yeah well so what else is new.

I got a lot out of that exercise. I've come to know Michael a little, and appreciate how very hard he works to make the world around him more intense and interesting than it would otherwise be. I approve of this desire on his part, and enjoy the efforts he's made as a writer, an editor, and a publisher. Speaking aloud the words in this book made it clear to me what a scouring, cleansing thing it is to make a question out of an answer. Mother. Mother? The Mother A Mother Some Mother...and to make a question out of the verb forms of this frighteningly large concept, Mother: to Mother, to Be A Mother...activities, identities, aspirations, longings...and the object of Mother is Son. Matthew. Some mother's son. The object of mothering, the subject of being a mother.

I suspect sons wonder more about mothers and mothering than daughters, potential/actual/present mothers, do; we will never know motherhood, the condition of Mother. Daughters can be mothers, even if they choose not to be. It's a mystery sons can't enter into, and many of us wish we could comprehend it better. We would be free of Mother if we could, we tell ourselves, free at last! So what does Seidlinger do with his Mother angst? What an artist does with every lump in the throat: Speaks it into being, limns it onto the air, strokes it onto pages physical or virtual.

Reading this Mother's journey around the bend, I Mothered myself. I found it good.