Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu

Knopf, 272 pp.

By Jane Rosenberg LaForge

Toward the end of a fevered odyssey that comprises most of Dinaw Mengestu’s new novel, the protagonist finds a manuscript written by his uncle and long-time father figure. “It’s hard to read,” says the man, a journalist who has pilloried his own career through a combination of drugs, alcohol, and procrastination. “There isn’t one story. Things start and end abruptly….I don’t always understand who’s speaking or what’s happening. If what you’ve written is fact or fiction…” The father figure, who may or may not be driving a cab meant to deliver the man home, tries to explain the plot. But to no avail. “It isn’t enough of a story,” the man insists. “At least not the way you wrote it. It raises all sorts of questions that you never answer.”

The man, Mamush, could very well be discussing Someone Like Us, which follows its characters from their beginnings in the cities and countryside of Ethiopia, throughout Europe, and across the United States. The narrative races between continents, creating a vortex that sometimes confuses the chronology of events, the whereabouts of certain characters, and the living with the dead. But Mengestu’s method is neither couched in magical realism nor postmodern apologies for the bewildering sequence of incidents and insights in the novel. He is instead trying to demonstrate how, for the next generation of Americans, the immigrant experience of their parents can be understood only at a remove. Mamush’s criticisms of his uncle-father’s life story, as well as his own discursive glances into language, lost traditions, and his failings, always comes at a distance that defies measurement.

A college girlfriend is quick to encourage this strategy for Mamush early in the novel, when he is struggling with an autobiographical writing assignment for a philosophy class. Mamush must list the most important places in his life but can’t come up with enough of them in any detail--until the girlfriend suggests fictionalizing the entire assignment. Mamush is inspired to write for more than two days about a persona he once assumed, based on a fake identification card he bought before college. Mamush is so consumed by the assignment—consulting maps, photographs, old newspapers to create an entire life story for this persona—that the girlfriend eventually declares that he’s a “donut. There’s a hole in the middle, where something solid should be” Something solid could be what he has always been seeking in his life, which grows to include a clear-eyed, Parisian wife and an apparently disabled son. But given the contradictory stories he’s been raised with, and his other baffling encounters with so-called real Americans, he isn’t likely to recognize it if he ever finds it.

Mamush will rely on that college persona again, as the novel chronicles Mamush’s surreal return to the U.S. from Paris and its uncanny detours. He will also either indulge or recall other conversations with that cab driver, Samuel, a friend of his immigrant mother whom he comes to understand, through another discursive story, is his biological father. “The worst thing you can do is leave people without an answer,” Samuel advises him, but that is exactly what Samuel does. Mamush tries to untangle the mysteries of Samuel’s life and death—did Samuel serve jail time for unpaid parking tickets or some other offense? Why so many parking tickets when Samuel prided himself on his ability to find parking spaces, as a valet in Washington D.C.? Was Samuel an alcoholic or drug addict, or both? Despite a life of fatigue, addictions and years of ill health, how did he die so suddenly; if it was suicide, wouldn’t he have left a note? But the facts will take him only so far; Mamush seeks out Samuel’s court records and finds that they’ve been sealed.

Or consider the breach Mamush cannot overcome when summoning memories of his mother mourning a friend during his childhood. He had never heard of his mother’s friend, Mary, until he listened to his mother talk about her on the telephone after she died. Mary was a pro bono lawyer who supposedly saved the family after a harrowing encounter with the authorities. Who exactly these authorities were—the then-Immigration and Naturalization Service or, as is suggested one-hundred pages later, child welfare services in Chicago—is never entirely settled. Mamush can chillingly recall how his mother and Samuel were carted off the police one day after the police arrive to arrest Samuel on some pretense. Mamush hides under the bed without the police detecting his presence; would his mother’s lying to the police, or leaving the boy unattended, have prompted another investigation only a lawyer could have fixed? “I might have never seen you again if it wasn’t for her,” Mamush’s mother once said. But neither Mamush nor the author connects these dots, as if such details are pointless.

The details might very well be pointless considering what people are willing to believe about the immigrant experience, an issue that haunts Mamush’s career. He first earns recognition as a journalist by writing about a murdered Somali cab driver in New York; the story lands him a television appearance and then other assignments about “about struggling but ultimately tenacious immigrants in America.” But after failing to complete an assignment on what Mamush acknowledges he pitched as a cliché—a militia leader in eastern Congo who is “a mix of Che Guevara meets Somali pirates”—Samuel suggests Mamush opt for lighter subject matter. “…people only want to read stories about us that make us look bad,” another Ethiopian immigrant will recall saying to Samuel about Mamush’s stories of suffering and toil among the emigres of Africa and Asia.

It is just this story, of immigrants who “… have money….good jobs….homes with four, five bedrooms…(living) better than most Americans in this country” that Samuel hopes to leave for Mamush, whose identity as an American, the son of immigrants, or an ex-patriot, has yet to gel. The novel also documents Samuel’s attempts to build a legacy for his son, whether it be a cab company that specializes in returning immigrants home or some type of written document—a street atlas Samuel has amended over the years with the best routes, or a dictionary he contemplates setting down for cab drivers and their clients. He finally decides on a simple tale of “how beautiful Ethiopia is. The lakes, the rivers. The mountains. The birds. ‘When I am finished,’ (Samuel) said, ‘no one will believe a country can be so rich and so poor at the same time.’ ’’ Whatever its content, Someone Like Us demonstrates how its form will likely be ghostly and ethereal, in a language that immigrants and their children use, with “oblique angles, through images, similes, metaphors, when something was like us but not us.”

Jane Rosenberg LaForge is a poet and novelist from New York. Her most recent book, of poetry and essays, is My Aunt's Abortion (BlazeVOX 2023).