Taking the Long Way Home: On Dinaw Mengestu's "Someone Like Us"

By Marcie McCauley on August 1, 2024

The doors are shut and the vehicle is in motion: readers participate in the journey undertaken by characters in Dinaw Mengestu's fourth novel through the perspective of Mamush. When Someone Like Us opens, this young man—born in Ethiopia, raised in the suburbs surrounding Washington D.C., and now living with Hannah and their two-year-old son in Paris—is returning home to confront the gap between memory and history, to consider where he belongs.

At the heart of Mengestu's fiction is the figure who has traveled some distance, worked hard to reestablish themself in unfamiliar places, and redefined their understanding of kinship. In his 2007 debut, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, Stephanos comes to America with dreams of owning a deli but begins as a valet. In How to Read the Air (2010), Jonas struggles to reconcile his personal past with his work with refugees. And the core of 2014's All Our Names is the silence where Isaac's story resides, where he inhabits memories rather than share them with his social worker, Helen.

These characters have routines but not security, ties but not connections, and relationships but not commitments: Mamush, too, feels restless and rootless as he moves through space and time. His present-day reality is absorbed by his travels: in concrete terms, towards a suburb in Virginia; in psychological terms, through a past characterized by unanswered (often even unspoken) questions.

Readers' security resides in total immersion in Mamush's perspective and in Mengestu's plain-speech recounting of events and his clear-eyed view: crucial when navigating uncharted territory between imagination and knowledge, truth and facts, isolation and connection. Mamush once created an entire backstory for the name applied to the fake I.D. card he later tucked between the pages of a book. He's concerned with how people fully inhabit their lives—their day-to-day and the expanse of their being—and he's become uneasy in his own skin.

There is an element of suspense in Someone Like Us, a slow reveal of what's known and what cannot be known. While preserving those specifics unspoiled, one could say it's akin to Jonas's process in an earlier novel, where he expands the stories of refugees to satisfy bureaucratic requirements, expands the stories of strangers on the street even, as a means of expanding his understanding of history: if he "could imagine where they had come from and how they had gotten here," then he could "add their stories to [his] own basket of origins."

Also significant is the relationship between the truth of the experiences of key adults in Mamush's life—initially his mother and Samuel and, later, Elsa, after Samuel marries her—and what facts remain as evidence (in court documents, for instance). Photographs are interspersed with narrative, images which draw attention to what's beyond the frame of the image, to what readers and other observers cannot see or know, but what's significant for characters in the novel. The text elucidates the characters' truths, and readers recognize the invisible elements, the importance of what's left unsaid and unaddressed.

Above all, matters of isolation and connection proliferate in the story. With Hannah, Mamush has a unique and intimate understanding. "We had built a dictionary of gestures and symbols that we trusted more than any phrase precisely because multiple meanings were always possible." Silence, here, is not isolating: the absence of language is an opportunity for clarity. And opportunities to congregate might not always be joyful. Mamush is told: "If you want to be a writer… come to more funerals. It's beautiful what we can make up."

Thematically, this is where the bulk of the novel's emotional power resides. As with writers like R.O. Kwon, Edward P. Jones, Amor Towles, Elizabeth Strout, Randall Kenan, and Bryan Washington, Mengestu is building a fictional universe, where characters who are central characters in one story appear on the margins of another story. Samuel, for instance, "often joked that if he didn't find a new job, he was going to gather all his friends to form an Olympic team of parking garage attendants." Readers familiar with Mengestu's backlist will recognize Stephanos immediately. "We are world-class parkers," Samuel declares, "We will take gold every time."

Someone Like Us opens with a description of suburban Maryland apartment complexes, arranged as if "someone had drawn circles on a map and said these people will live here, and these here, and never shall they meet." But the novel closes with one man's story that traces the travels of these circles' inhabitants. A single finger can trace the route between these seemingly isolated circles and remind readers that we can choose to meet. That if we can imagine it, we can make it true.