A homecoming tale from a MacArthur ‘genius’ resists tropes of immigrant life

Across four fine novels, Dinaw Mengestu has challenged conventional wisdom about how immigrant narratives ought to work. It’s not just that he’s skeptical of pat yarns about trauma and assimilating into American life. He strives to use language to reveal the instability at the heart of the lives of exiles, emigres and refugees without falsely promising an easy resolution.

His exploration of slippery selves in a complicated America earned him a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2012, and gave him entree as a journalist covering Darfur and other troubled regions across the globe. But in “Someone Like Us,” his first novel in a decade, Mengestu subjects that kind of accomplishment to the same level of scrutiny and skepticism. Mamush, the novel’s narrator, is an Ethiopian American writer who specializes in journalism about immigrant lives. A family friend is unimpressed: “You write stories for people who want to feel bad about immigrants.”

As the story opens, Mamush is mourning the death of Samuel, whom he calls his father two pages in. But Mamush’s mother has never confirmed Samuel’s fatherhood, just that she knew him in Ethiopia.

Upon learning that Samuel was deathly ill (of what, we’re not certain), Mamush had hastily left his family in Paris and flown to the Washington, D.C., suburbs where he grew up. Then, to untangle the mystery of his origins, he had gone to Chicago, where his mother and Samuel first settled. He inherited stories about Samuel’s run-ins with racist cops and that he “spent some time in prison, but I don’t know what for.” Mamush hoped his journalism chops could uncover the truth, but he comes up empty at the courthouse: The arrest records are sealed, and while he was searching, Samuel died.

All of that information is carefully dispersed across Mamush’s narration, which flickers between truthful chronicling and imagined realities, each sinuously flowing from one to the other. Mamush occupies a world where things constantly seem to be neither here nor there. Hannah, his wife, is a photographer who’s been assigned to shoot “semi-ruins… buildings that haven’t collapsed but probably will soon.” As Mamush waits in line at the courthouse on a frigid day in Chicago, a woman offers him a scarf, but he “wanted to tell her that I didn’t need protection from the cold, that what she saw was a shadow version of me; my real self was hundreds of miles away in the suburbs of northern Virginia.”

The rift in a clear reality is most pronounced when it comes to Samuel. “Today you say you’re like a father to me,” Mamush tells him once. “But maybe tomorrow you’re like a distant cousin I’ve only met twice. Similes can change. They can be revised, edited.” His understanding of Samuel is pieced together from scraps of memories and documents, but he’s in a family that holds memory in contempt. When in college he requested his mother’s help writing an essay about childhood memories, she sardonically asked if she could get a tuition refund.

So how do you write a story about fathers and sons when fatherhood is questioned, or nonexistent, and every story you could tell would feel like the most trite and obvious one? Throughout “Someone Like Us,” you can feel Mengestu’s determination to avoid falling into familiar immigrant narrative tropes. Samuel’s experience with racism is maddening but nothing cataclysmic; Mamush shares little about his family’s past in war-torn Ethiopia, and less about Samuel’s prison stint. Straightforward reporting is impossible for him: Mamush irritatedly recalls an editor who kicked a story back to him, saying that what he filed had “nothing to do with the story you were supposed to write. Where’s the portrait? What is the conflict? And why should people care?”

The kind of anti-characterization that Mengestu plays with here is risky. Rather than merely feeling disassociated, Mamush courts featurelessness. (“You’re like a donut,” a friend tells him. “There’s a hole in the middle, where something solid should be.”) Rather than become a tragic, mysterious father figure, Samuel could end up just a bundle of confusions that resist interpretation — Schrodinger’s dad.

But Mengestu’s solution is a sharp one: He makes the urge to craft a coherent story something of a character in itself, revealing how desperate we are to contrive narratives from scattered parts. In the closing chapters, Mengestu concocts a kind of fantasia out of this instinct, building an imagined story about Samuel from the available evidence, shaped by Mamush’s own uncertain yearnings.

In the process, Mengestu gets to have it both ways, telling an immigrant narrative while also critiquing it. He encompasses the feelings of loss and detachment that Mamush deals with, while recognizing that there’s no clear path from point A to point B. In that regard, he is his maybe-father’s son: As Mamush is a roving journalist, Samuel was a cab driver. This quietly affecting novel captures the uncertainty that comes with statelessness and rootlessness.

At one point, Mamush describes his ambition to write a story “about one group of people in one place at one time, who move to another place at another time for a hundred different reasons we can never explain, and which we can never fully comprehend …. There’s no plot.” It seems an impossible task. But in Mengestu’s hands, plotlessness and incomprehension never seemed so essential to getting the story right.

Mark Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”