This Novel’s Reliably Unreliable Narrator Is Here, There and Everywhere

SOMEONE LIKE US, by Dinaw Mengestu

Secrets are the enduring motors that make fiction run: what you aren’t telling me, what I’m keeping from you, what the neighbors know about the love affair. Dinaw Mengestu’s novels are powered by something different but akin: an urge toward privacy that keeps his mercurial characters elusive, even to themselves, but not opaque.

The main character of “All Our Names” (2014) never reveals to his love interest, or to the reader, the name he was born with. Jonas, the dissembling protagonist of Mengestu’s “How to Read the Air” (2010), claims that “whoever can’t see you can’t hurt you.” And Mamush, the reliably unreliable narrator of “Someone Like Us,” never quite secures his slippery grip on reality, on his own motivations, on his own past.

As a driver of plot, personal and emotional slipperiness is a trickier endeavor than old-fashioned secrecy; we can’t rely on the well-timed reveal, the moment when all is made clear, nor enjoy knowing more than the characters while waiting for them to catch up. To appreciate Mengestu’s work, you have to be ready to live in uncertainty, to find any truths obliquely, if at all. If you can accomplish that, the journey is well worth the discomfort.

The concrete facts of “Someone Like Us”: Mamush, a journalist in Paris, is supposed to fly to Washington, D.C., with his wife and young son to spend Christmas in the Virginia suburb where his Ethiopian immigrant mother lives. His ride from the airport will be Samuel, who lives nearby and is most likely Mamush’s unacknowledged father. But Mamush ends up traveling alone — his son has a mysterious medical condition, an unexplained difficulty in movement that eerily echoes his father’s emotional paralysis — and although Mamush makes it to the airport with plenty of time, he manages to miss his flight. This is nothing new; as his wife points out, “You look for ruin. And if you can’t find it, you make it.”

Credit…Juan Bernabeu

Instead of flying to Washington, Mamush gets himself to Chicago, where he was born. He has a notion to track down Samuel’s criminal record there and reconstruct his own unspoken past, using his journalistic skills. (Mamush writes, as Mengestu himself does, about civil wars in Africa, life in Darfur, refugees in the United States.) By the time Mamush arrives at his mother’s house in Virginia, Samuel has died by suicide just hours earlier.