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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HAUNTING AMERICAN DREAMS  
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Jonathan Lee
August 1, 2024
The Guardian
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_ A journalist travels across the US to unravel the secrets
surrounding the life and death of his Ethiopian immigrant father. _

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_Someone Like Us_
Dinaw Mengestu
Knopf
ISBN: 9780385350006

Dinaw Mengestu’s haunting novel about 21st-century American life
starts with a sudden death. The deceased man is Samuel – a
charismatic, witty, enigmatic Ethiopian immigrant whom our narrator,
Mamush, thinks of as his father. But Samuel’s life will turn out to
be every bit as mysterious as his demise, and as full of
contradictions as America itself.

When Mamush learns of Samuel’s death, he leaves his wife and child
behind in France and returns to the close-knit Ethiopian community
in Washington DC that shaped his childhood. He’s propelled forward
by feelings of personal grief, but also a professional urge to
investigate the truth. Mamush is a journalist who, not unlike his
creator – the recipient of the Guardian first book award for his
fiction, and also accolades for reportage – has had success writing
about conflicts at home and abroad. But he has grown tired of covering
“long-simmering border conflicts and the refugee crises that grew
out of them”, and meeting the needs of editors for whom, he drily
notes, “dictators were once again all the rage”.

 
Samuel’s death gives Mamush a reason to undertake a journey across
America – but how self-serving might that be? As his inquiries into
the end of his father’s life unfurl, the question of what really
happened to Samuel becomes something with more immediate, evolving
stakes: what has really happened to Mamush? In chasing his
father’s ghost, is he hoping to exorcise demons of his own? Hints
of past addictions haunt his present sobriety. And his marriage to
a photographer, who “takes pictures of apartment buildings on the
verge of collapse”, feels like its own half-ruined structure
awaiting demolition. His unappeasable mother gets one of the novel’s
best lines when she questions how well her son’s expensive western
education has served his overall happiness: “How can I get my money
back. This is America. Refund.”

But reimbursements aren’t offered on the American dream. Before
his body was found in suspicious circumstances, Samuel had been
working as a taxi driver. He had harboured grand plans to expand his
business: hiring drivers in Chicago, Ohio, Kentucky, he tells Mamush,
will enable him “to get across the country”.

 

But a man who drives for a living also “knows better than anyone
when someone is in the wrong place”. Samuel’s ambitions in America
were never realised, and thoughts of his past life in Ethiopia left
him feeling stuck in a state of not-quite-belonging – an
inbetweenness that is beautifully baked into the very structure of
Mengestu’s novel. The book’s main narrative journey is tightly
stretched across three days. But that is just a frame for its
constant, restless movement between past and present. Samuel’s life,
chapter by chapter, rises up through the cracks caused by his death.
Flashbacks continually resurrect and revise him until his enigmatic
existence can be glimpsed from all angles.
 
“If this were a crime novel,” our narrator wryly admits midway
through, “this would be the moment when Samuel confessed to having
done something terrible.” But instead of blockbuster revelations, we
get meandering Sebaldian reflections on selfhood, and ghostly
photographs of buildings and faces inserted intermittently into the
text. All of this increases the book’s exquisite sense
of alienation. Like Teju Cole’s Open City
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Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland
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Us is perfectly attuned to what it means to roam freely as an
immigrant in America – a country that contains shards of all the
other places its occupants have called home. A feeling of exile
permeates Mengestu’s book to such an extent that the title comes to
feel like its own quiet challenge: who do you picture when you read
the words Someone Like Us? Is it a person of the same skin colour,
class background, age? Or can our idea of the US – or any western
country – be big enough to offer a more inclusive answer?

Someone Like_ _Us starts out like a mystery novel but becomes, in the
end, something more like a ghost story: a meditation on the ways we
can be part of a place yet simultaneously separate from it. It is the
kind of book Mamush’s father says he plans to write one day:
a paean to the beauty and hardship present in his native Ethiopia,
but also alive and present in every corner of the United States.
“When I am finished,” he tells Mamush, “no one will believe a
country can be so rich and so poor at the same time.”

 

Jonathan Lee’s latest novel is _The Great Mistake_ (Knopf).

 

* Fiction
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* U.S. Fiction
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* The Lives of Immigrants
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