A Mysterious Death and Urgent Quest Drive This Troubled Protagonist

Three paragraphs into his wise and genial novel, “Someone Like Us,” Dinaw Mengestu drops a grenade that sits smoldering in the story; we almost forget it as the author toggles through a span of four chilly December days.

It’s evidence of his dexterous narrative technique — tipping in secrets and secrets-within-secrets — that propels his tale toward a satisfying, if ambivalent, conclusion.

An Ethiopian-American born in Chicago and raised in suburban Washington, D.C., Mamush is the only child of a single woman who confines herself to a job and a tight circle of neighbors, including her lifelong confidante Samuel, a livery cab driver wedded to the angelic Elsa. Both Samuel and Elsa have nurtured Mamush over the years, surrogate parents.

After college, Mamush, following the paths of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, had pulled up stakes for Paris and an erratic career as a journalist and fiction writer. He adores his French wife Hannah and their toddler son, yet struggles with the boy’s perplexing medical condition and his own murky demons.

His marriage teeters; as Hannah tells him, “You look for ruin. And if you can’t find it, you make it.”

The family has planned a trip back to Virginia for Christmas but Mamush’s multiple addictions, from drugs to alcohol, derail the holiday cheer, and he goes alone, missing his flight and squeezing onto another, bound for the Windy City. While he’s in the air, a tragedy unfolds on the ground: Samuel dies under mysterious circumstances, which Mamush discovers when he staggers, jet-lagged, into his mother’s house.

“Someone Like Us” plaits plotlines as Mengestu weaves between continents and timestreams, limning racial friction, immigrant dispossession and Mamush’s bid for redemption. Embedded within the book are original photographs that enhance a sense of movement.

At the novel’s center is the rakish, flawed Samuel, who yearns for a legion of superhero cab drivers, righting wrongs in a world indifferent to suffering. Mamush imagines affecting conversations with Samuel, catching up the dead man on gossip, piecing together the puzzle of his own identity.

Eventually he recognizes this father-figure in a blaze of clarity, hiding in plain sight: Samuel had “the perfect cover for disappearing into such a backdrop — a middle-aged Ethiopian man of average weight and height who spoke in elaborately constructed sentences in both English and Amharic, who on most days wore some version of a long-sleeve button-down shirt and earth-toned sweater with dark-colored slacks, never jeans, driving a dark blue sedan that doubled as a taxi.”

Samuel’s the outside striver with outsized dreams, reminiscent of the charismatic Ayale in Nafkote Tamirat’s novel “The Parking Lot Attendant.”

Mengestu sprinkles “Someone” with juicy details — a dilapidated courthouse, an alter ego, an obsession with mini-mansions — throughout Mamush’s troubled journey home. There are flashbacks tucked among flashbacks, slowing momentum just when the author should accelerate. And Mengestu’s prose, while solid, never sings.

But these are quibbles: the novel’s architecture enthralls, drawing us into the opaque naves and transepts of an addict’s shame and an immigrant’s tenacious hope. Where some see crowded rooms, Mengestu sees cathedrals.

“Someone Like Us” keeps opening and opening its emotional spaces, long after Samuel is silent.

“Someone Like Us” by Dinaw Mengestu. (Publisher: Knopf), 272 pages, $28.

Source: Knopf