Guide Overview
Somebody Like Us
By: Dinaw Mengestu
Knopf: 272 pages, $28
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Throughout 4 wonderful novels, Dinaw Mengestu has challenged typical knowledge about how immigrant narratives should work. It’s not simply that he’s skeptical of pat yarns about trauma and assimilating into American life. He strives to make use of language to disclose the instability on the coronary heart of the lives of exiles, emigres and refugees with out falsely promising a straightforward decision.
His exploration of slippery selves in a sophisticated America earned him a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2012, and gave him entree as a journalist protecting Darfur and different troubled areas throughout the globe. However in “Somebody Like Us,” his first novel in a decade, Mengestu topics that sort of accomplishment to the identical stage of scrutiny and skepticism. Mamush, the novel’s narrator, is an Ethiopian American author who makes a speciality of journalism about immigrant lives. A household pal is unimpressed: “You write tales for individuals who wish to really feel dangerous about immigrants.”
Because the story opens, Mamush is mourning the demise of Samuel, whom he calls his father two pages in. However Mamush’s mom has by no means confirmed Samuel’s fatherhood, simply that she knew him in Ethiopia.
Upon studying that Samuel was deathly unwell (of what, we’re not sure), Mamush had swiftly left his household in Paris and flown to the Washington, D.C., suburbs the place he grew up. Then, to untangle the thriller of his origins, he had gone to Chicago, the place his mom and Samuel first settled. He inherited tales about Samuel’s run-ins with racist cops and that he “spent a while in jail, however I don’t know what for.” Mamush hoped his journalism chops may uncover the reality, however he comes up empty on the courthouse: The arrest information are sealed, and whereas he was looking, Samuel died.
All of that data is rigorously dispersed throughout Mamush’s narration, which sparkles between truthful chronicling and imagined realities, every sinuously flowing from one to the opposite. Mamush occupies a world the place issues always appear to be neither right here nor there. Hannah, his spouse, is a photographer who’s been assigned to shoot “semi-ruins… buildings that haven’t collapsed however most likely will quickly.” As Mamush waits in line on the courthouse on a frigid day in Chicago, a girl presents him a shawl, however he “needed to inform her that I didn’t want safety from the chilly, that what she noticed was a shadow model of me; my actual self was a whole bunch of miles away within the suburbs of northern Virginia.”
The rift in a transparent actuality is most pronounced on the subject of Samuel. “Right this moment you say you’re like a father to me,” Mamush tells him as soon as. “However possibly tomorrow you’re like a distant cousin I’ve solely met twice. Similes can change. They are often revised, edited.” His understanding of Samuel is pieced collectively from scraps of recollections and paperwork, however he’s in a household that holds reminiscence in contempt. When in faculty he requested his mom’s assist writing an essay about childhood recollections, she sardonically requested if she may get a tuition refund.
So how do you write a narrative about fathers and sons when fatherhood is questioned, or nonexistent, and each story you might inform would really feel like essentially the most trite and apparent one? All through “Somebody Like Us,” you possibly can really feel Mengestu’s willpower to keep away from falling into acquainted immigrant narrative tropes. Samuel’s expertise with racism is exasperating however nothing cataclysmic; Mamush shares little about his household’s previous in war-torn Ethiopia, and fewer about Samuel’s jail stint. Easy reporting is not possible for him: Mamush irritatedly recollects an editor who kicked a narrative again to him, saying that what he filed had “nothing to do with the story you had been supposed to jot down. The place’s the portrait? What’s the battle? And why ought to individuals care?”
The sort of anti-characterization that Mengestu performs with right here is dangerous. Moderately than merely feeling disassociated, Mamush courts featurelessness. (“You’re like a donut,” a pal tells him. “There’s a gap within the center, the place one thing strong ought to be.”) Moderately than turn out to be a tragic, mysterious father determine, Samuel may find yourself only a bundle of confusions that resist interpretation — Schrodinger’s dad.
However Mengestu’s resolution is a pointy one: He makes the urge to craft a coherent story one thing of a personality in itself, revealing how determined we’re to contrive narratives from scattered components. Within the closing chapters, Mengestu concocts a sort of fantasia out of this intuition, constructing an imagined story about Samuel from the accessible proof, formed by Mamush’s personal unsure yearnings.
Within the course of, Mengestu will get to have it each methods, telling an immigrant narrative whereas additionally critiquing it. He encompasses the sentiments of loss and detachment that Mamush offers with, whereas recognizing that there’s no clear path from level A to level B. In that regard, he’s his maybe-father’s son: As Mamush is a roving journalist, Samuel was a cab driver. This quietly affecting novel captures the uncertainty that comes with statelessness and rootlessness.
At one level, Mamush describes his ambition to jot down a narrative “about one group of individuals in a single place at one time, who transfer to a different place at one other time for 100 completely different causes we will by no means clarify, and which we will by no means totally comprehend …. There’s no plot.” It appears an not possible activity. However in Mengestu’s fingers, plotlessness and incomprehension by no means appeared so important to getting the story proper.
Mark Athitakis is a author in Phoenix and writer of “The New Midwest.”