There’s a recurring fantasy running through Dinaw Mengestu’s new novel, Someone Like Us: It’s a fantasy about a word-of-mouth, nation-wide network of taxi cabs that would come to the aid of "immigrants, migrants, refugees, anyone who was in the wrong place and needed to be somewhere else but didn’t know how to get there.” The drivers would be immigrants themselves and, therefore, more trustworthy to their nervous passengers.
The character who cooks up the idea for this taxi service is named Samuel: He’s a taxi driver and an immigrant from Ethiopia who lived, most recently, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Samuel is also the absent center of this story, given that he’s just died when the novel opens.
Our narrator, an Ethiopian American journalist named Mamush, has flown in from his home in Paris to visit Samuel. Mamush tells us, “I’d known for years that Samuel was my father, [but] neither he nor my mother had ever expected me to treat him as such.”
Mamush’s mother and Samuel grew up together in Ethiopia and share a long history, most of it muffled in silence. Given that Mamush missed his reunion with Samuel by only a few hours, a melancholy atmosphere of “too lateness” hangs over this novel like exhaust fumes from that imaginary rescue fleet of taxi cabs.
I love the way Mengestu writes. Beginning with his stunning 2007 debut novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, he’s given voice to characters engulfed in their own solitude.
I also sometimes feel frustrated with how Mengestu writes: specifically, with how this novel keeps reminding readers of the near-impossibility of breaking out of the same old mold when it comes to telling immigrant stories. Ironically, Mengestu’s own ingenuity and eloquence as a writer show at least one way to do so.
In Someone Like Us, Mengestu has wedded his signature postmodern musings about the imprisoning limits of narrative to a chronologically scrambled, but traditional, searching-for-origins tale. After Mamush arrives at his mother’s home and learns that Samuel, whom he hasn’t seen in almost five years, has died, Mamush begins doing what journalists do: interviewing people and digging up court records. There’s even a moment — a kind of tongue-in-cheek homage to many a mystery novel — when Mamush discovers a secret room of sorts where Samuel has left behind an autobiographical manuscript for Mamush’s eyes only.
Why all this urgency to uncover Samuel’s history?
Like his characters, Mengestu prefers silence over explanations; oblique, rather than direct talk, but we readers can draw some inferences. Mamush, as his wife, Hannah, tells him, is “drifting” and, like Samuel, he’s struggled with the demons of addiction. Perhaps knowing more about the backstory his mother and Samuel share would help anchor him.
Fear and grief may also be propelling Mamush’s desire for reconnection: He and Hannah have a young son who’s developed severe disabilities. Here’s how Mamush describes their life in Paris:
Hannah and I had only recently come to the table of adult-sized problems laid out specifically for us. In doing so, we had learned to stop asking ourselves if we were living the lives we had imagined, if we were happy with who we had become, whom we had married. Our jobs grew dull, our rent went up, but it was only after our son was born that we understood the possible scale of things to worry about lying in wait.
At one point early in the story, Mamush recalls how Samuel used to signal the start of conversations by saying the word “play” in Amharic, “an invitation to play with words.” That’s what Mengestu does here, slipping from present to past; reality to dream within the space of single sentences.
Mengestu also “plays” with other forms, most strikingly with photographs included in these pages that he’s taken from his own life, suggesting there may be a trace of autofiction in this novel.
In Someone Like Us, Mengestu has written a most idiosyncratic American immigrant novel, a genre that’s been available to generations and to recent arrivals from every point on the globe. All the resonant tropes are here — the crowded apartments and the random acts of nativist violence — but, by altering the reader’s vantage points, Mengestu ultimately turns the story back onto us and the control we think we have over the story of our own lives.
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