Erik Gleibermann in LA Review of Books (LRB): HUMAN BEINGS ARE autobiographers by nature. Whether or not we ultimately write down any words, we can’t help mentally composing narratives out of our emotionally messy lives, attempting to seam coherence from chaos. Yet just as they provide a mode of self-discovery, so too can these autobiographical impulses cross over into self-deception—and the line between the two can be thin.
Dinaw Mengestu’s stunning new novel Someone Like Us follows an Ethiopian American man and his immigrant fatherlike figure, both of whom stumble along these kinds of shaky, self-constructed borders. The man—our narrator Mamush—is a lapsed journalist flying to Washington, DC, from Paris, where he lives with his wife, Hannah, and their toddler son. He’s en route to visit his mother and her lifelong friend Samuel, an overworked cabbie who has played an erratic avuncular role since Mamush was six years old and living with his mother in Chicago.
The novel builds around this two-day trip, including Mamush’s impulsive detour from Paris to Chicago and his subsequent arrival in DC, where he learns that Samuel has taken his own life. On the same day he receives this devastating news, Mamush opens the glove box of a taxi Samuel has recently driven to find a familiar US road atlas—one Mamush enjoyed studying as a child. Now, he’s too cynical to hope the worn booklet marked by Samuel’s initials might steer him to answers, “as if this were the kind of story where even minor objects were the source of great mystery and intrigue.”
These events plunge the narrator back into troubling childhood memories. The story jumps around in time as Mamush searches Samuel’s life and his own to unearth how their ill-defined relationship has shaped Mamush’s desultory and isolated experiences over more than two decades. But any landmarks with the potential to guide this journey have been obscured; both characters hide personal truths and suffer addictions to cope with pain.
It’s tempting to classify Someone Like Us as an “immigrant novel,” framing Mamush’s habitual fabrications as a second-generation inheritance from refugees who’ve disowned traumas of the Ethiopian Civil War (1974–91) years earlier. In one conversation, Samuel—prone to philosophizing when he isn’t drained from his long cabbie shifts—makes an existential distinction between immigrants and native-born Americans. “You don’t lie very well, Mamush,” he states. “You’re different from us. You were born here. You think the important thing is to tell the truth, even if you don’t know what that is.”
Yet Mengestu’s latest pushes far beyond “immigrant novel” status or any similar, confining labels, meditating expansively on questions of displacement, family love, and the battle between denial and self-reckoning. Notably, the award-winning author—who was himself born in Ethiopia, accompanying his family to the United States at age two—explored these same themes in his previous novels, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007) and How to Read the Air (2010). Both books similarly involve an isolated narrator of Ethiopian descent who pursues identity by way of a pained, sometimes imagined, dialogue with an inaccessible father figure; under stress, the protagonists also escape through substances and invent scenes from an alternative life that, in certain desperate and vulnerable moments, they almost come to believe.
More here.
