Novelist Dinaw Mengestu thinks deeply about how stories are told, especially migrant tales. His earlier books — “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears,” “How to Read the Air” and “All Our Names” — explored the psychic tolls on Ethiopian immigrants of being adrift in an alien American landscape. With “Someone Like Us,” out this week from Knopf, Mengestu approaches this essential material from a variety of angles.
The main character, Mamush, who was born in the United States but lives in France, is a disillusioned journalist. He returns to visit his mother outside Washington, D.C.
, and finds that Samuel, an enigmatic father figure and member of the local Ethiopian community, has mysteriously died. Mamush embarks on a quest to unravel the secrets of Samuel’s life and death, searching his own foggy memories as well as a paper trail that includes court documents and parking tickets to flesh out Samuel’s precarious, itinerant existence as a cabdriver in the United States. “If looked at closely,” Mamush says, these records “say something about a larger story still being written about America and why people came to it and what they found when they did.
” Sitting outside his home at Bard College, where he founded and directs the Center for Ethics and Writing program, Mengestu spoke to the Book Review about the hidden lives of his characters, who often exist in “more than one place at a time.” This conversation has been edited for length and clarity..