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 or Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Someone Like 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 (Granta).
• Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu is published by Sceptre (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
