A Road Atlas for Self-Reckoning

Erik Gleibermann confronts the elusive father figure in his review of “Someone Like Us,” the third novel from acclaimed Ethiopian-American writer Dinaw Mengestu.

By Erik GleibermannAugust 1, 2024

• Fiction

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.

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Journalism initially appears a promising path for Mamush to consider his relationship to Africa and to the refugee experience. In the years after college, he has some success writing profiles of Ethiopian, Somali, and Darfuri immigrants in the United States, and reporting on various political crises from Africa. But he seems personally divested from these stories and the injustices they highlight. “There was the year of child soldiers followed by months when it seemed like dictators were once again all the rage,” he states cynically, neglecting to name specific countries, much less dictators. Over time, Mamush fails to complete assignments, spirals into addiction, and grapples with his own grief rather than documenting that of others. After he moves to Paris and meets Hannah, he half-heartedly tries to write fiction, squeezing out paragraphs for a painfully self-referential novel in which the narrator struggles to stay sober until noon.

Mamush demonstrates more motivation as an investigative journalist of his own life during the book’s central two-day episode. Delaying his anticipated meeting with Samuel at the Washington, DC, airport, Mamush lands in Chicago carrying a handful of family photographs and heads to the courthouse, hoping to learn why Samuel was periodically jailed when Mamush was a child. Though Mamush claims to have forgotten much of his childhood, his ruminations gradually reveal how lies, absence, and silence pervaded his home. His distressed mother, unnamed in the story, didn’t teach him Amharic and spoke little of her Ethiopian past. She never divulged the history of her relationship with Samuel and, though the young Mamush senses a hidden story, he learns not to ask questions. After the two move to DC (Samuel follows suit, renting a nearby apartment), a teenage Mamush hears his mother leave each morning for a mysterious job. At the Chicago courthouse, in the present day, he examines an old information form his mother had filled out. Studying this document, he notes that he has never asked her why they have different last names.

Mamush learns to fill gaps in his story by way of invention. At college in New York, he creates a fake ID using the name Christopher T. Williams and a Chicago address. When he returns to DC for a summer, he assumes this alter ego first in libraries and cafes, by day, then in the dive bars he frequents late into the night. He sketches Christopher’s boyhood for a school autobiography assignment, going so far as to consult maps and photographs of Chicago to achieve a sense of authenticity. It’s as though he’s dreaming backwards, into a brighter past: “Christopher Williams had been happy enough as a child,” Mamush decides. “He was well-liked but not popular. Private but not quiet or shy. In his yearbook students wrote comments such as ‘Great to know you.’”

A similar kind of dissimulation strains his marriage with Hannah. Even so, the couple’s playful dialogue exhibits a tender lyricism—especially as they care for their son, who suffers a malady no doctor can diagnose. The child (also unnamed, like Mamush’s mother) can’t stand up; he’s barely able to move his body. Though the symbolism here seems a bit labored, it’s an intriguing figuration of both Mamush’s inertia and his need for an anchoring bond.

Mamush’s tendency to lie undercuts his partnership with Hannah from their first days. When she buys him an introductory French grammar book early in their relationship, he promises to study, all the while knowing he never will—as though building closer communication with the outer world were pointless, if not intolerable.

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While Mamush the character often proves unreliable, Mamush the narrator offers a scrupulous accounting of his foibles and inconsistencies. Though the disparity initially distracted me, any ostensible tensions might be reconciled by imagining the narrator’s healthier, future position in addiction recovery. It’s a subtle but vital extension of Mengestu’s brilliant representation of shifts in time and Mamush’s mental processes: by tacking back and forth, cutting and splicing the central, present-day episode with years of previous memories, the author conveys the character’s dislocation, yet also animates his quest to find meaning and identity among myriad fragments of experience.

Samuel’s atlas appears to carry the potential to bind these fragments of life and personhood. In the space of a single, brief passage, Mamush relates the day he discovered the book in the taxi’s glove box after Samuel’s death, transitioning to the day he spent scrutinizing its pages on a coffee table as a teen, and finally to a day early in his marriage during which he described the book to Hannah, who was accompanying him to meet Samuel and his mother in Washington, DC, for the first time. “This is my life in America,” Samuel tells the teenage Mamush. “Do you see what I mean? But it will be different for you. Thank God for that.”

Samuel’s comment suggests that, as an immigrant cabbie scraping out a living, he has only the ability to ferry others; he is effectively powerless to chart his own life, while Mamush retains the means to choose his destinations. Samuel’s testimonies surrounding immigrant hardship most often feature the experiences of others; still, he recounts a few devastating personal experiences. He remembers one incident in which DC police, looking for an African American suspect, stopped him and, upon hearing his accent, laughed, used the N-word, then dumped him miles away in the city’s predominantly Black Anacostia neighborhood.

Samuel has at least adjusted enough to master his new country’s physical landscape. At the time of his death, it has been over 20 years since he fled war-torn Ethiopia. In a long, dramatic dialogue that Samuel and Mamush manage only by speaking in third person over the phone, Samuel recounts his harrowing escape from Addis Ababa and reveals his elusive task of navigating the urban US as he endures financial hardship, racism, and memory’s weight. “He thinks if he can memorize the entire city,” Samuel says of himself, “he’ll be able to sleep better at night. He’ll know how one street connects to the next and he imagines if he continues that process long enough, he’ll never be lost again.”

Here, displaced pronouns allow the two men to finally confront deeper truths.

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Mamush the impassive narrator doesn’t directly acknowledge, in either third or first person, the love between himself and Samuel. And the novel elides the central question of whether Samuel is, in actual fact, Mamush’s biological father. Still, we detect a deep bond in occasional anecdotes: Mamush recalls riding around DC in the backseat of Samuel’s cab, for instance, pretending to be a rich customer as Samuel invites him to travel anywhere in the world. When Mamush requests Australia, Samuel turns to Mamush’s mother in the passenger seat for approval. “Let him live with the kangaroos,” she laughs, and Samuel gives Mamush a high five. It is perhaps the book’s one pure moment showcasing their familial joy.

Despite these anecdotes, Samuel remains shadowy. At times, I felt like I was looking at him at night, through windshield glare on the way to some remote destination only he knew. Mamush’s mother speaks of him as “tefou,” an Amharic word that means absent or missing. Samuel’s favorite philosophical theme is prevarication. Lying, he observes at one point, is an essential survival tool, especially for immigrants navigating an inhospitable America. “If you can’t lie to people, then you have no hope of succeeding in this country,” he tells Mamush. Apparently, lying is also central to the rituals of Ethiopian life: “If you want to be a writer, Mamush, come to more [Ethiopian] funerals. It’s beautiful what we can make up.”

Samuel ultimately succumbs to the burdens he carries. Still, he harbors an inspiring vision while alive. He dreams of creating an underground, cross-country cab network to guide refugees and other immigrants like himself—those who need safe passage inside a vast and unforgiving America, those afraid to leave their homes or travel in public. In concept, it’s a service that will aid “anyone who was in the wrong place and needed to be somewhere else but didn’t know how to get there.” He plans to have it operating within a year and shows Mamush a plan that enumerates cities, distances, and driving costs. As I read of Mamush scanning the data skeptically, I protested. I wanted to believe in Samuel’s caretaking dream. I wondered whether Samuel was actually nourishing an impractical fantasy or if Mamush read it that way because he feared the unsettling possibility that his unreliable father figure might briefly become a true model of purpose.

Mengestu eventually turns their relationship, already elusive, into an ultimately unsolvable puzzle by introducing a confessional manuscript Samuel left behind in the recovery house where he was living at the time of his suicide. Like the stories he recounted to Mamush and others throughout his years in the United States, the pages appear to fuse autobiography with fiction. Mamush’s imagined discussion of the text with Samuel further layers and complicates the novel’s storyline. In the end, maybe the manuscript will offer Mamush keys to Samuel’s life. Maybe it will only deepen the man’s mystery. Whatever Mamush decides, the lesson is likely the same. If he is to find direction for his future, he’ll need to start designing his own atlas for life.

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Featured image: Fisk 12, 1944, is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 by Radical Cartography.