A donut with a hole where something solid should be

The largest concentration of Ethiopian immigrants to the United States is found in and around Washington DC, and that’s where this novel is set. The protagonist, Mamush (a fond family nickname) is Ethiopian-American, born and raised in the US, but now living in Paris with his wife Hannah and their two-year-old son. He has promised to visit his mother in the DC suburbs for a week, and on the day he arrives, his father-figure Samuel is found dead in a garage.

There is a lot of introspection and existential crisis in this novel, but it is not at all the familiar immigrant novel with a hyphenated American main character agonizing over where he belongs. This particular hyphenated American has many other issues to focus on from the past, such as the unknown backstory of his mother, who his father was, and what happened during their Chicago years. And in the present, his marriage is dissolving and his child has a terminal neurological disorder.

Is Samuel actually Mamush’s father? Near the end of the book, it is suggested this is the case, but long before that, the reader can see so many similarities that the possible genetic connection is largely irrelevant. Samuel was born in Ethiopia and Mamush in the US, but both are wanderers with inconsistent jobs: Samuel was a cab-driver, and Mamush a journalist. Both are unreliable as narrators and in real life. Mamush misses his flight almost on purpose, then tells his wife half-truths and buys a very expensive ticket to Chicago instead of Virginia. Samuel would vanish for days on benders or on drugs, while Mamush’s wife says of him:

You look for ruin. And if you can’t find it, you make it.

Mamush’s wife Hannah is a photographer, and the novel is interspersed with ‘her’ photographs, which for me was one of the best features of the book. They are black-and-white studies of places and objects, and are quite lovely.

The novel has moments that I enjoyed, with a wry humour. In a college philosophy class, Mamush has an assignment to catalogue places of importance to him. He can come up with very few, so he asks his mother:

“I don’t understand,” she said. “This is a class? […] How can I get my money back. This is America. Refund.”

As a journalist, Mamush largely covers Africa:

In the beginning it was mines, mining, anything related to gold or diamonds in Central Africa. When that faded, I switched to long-simmering border conflicts and the refugee crises that grew out of them. There was the year of child soldiers followed by months when it seemed dictators were once again all the rage. Before interest in all things Africa bottomed out, I convinced an editor to send me to eastern Congo.

There are other passages that are descriptive, perceptive, and original:

[Mamush’s mother] was proud to the edge of vanity; she marveled as much as anyone how year after year she held firm against even the most negligible signs of aging. She looked tired now, her eyes folded in at the corners, as if any moment she would drift off into sleep. It wasn’t time but grief that had caught her, and I suspected she worried that most people wouldn’t know the difference.

This is a darkly amusing take on the Ethiopian diaspora, who like many immigrant communities prefer to believe that their community had no problems before emigrating.

He pointed out that in the diaspora, just like in Ethiopia, there were no high school dropouts or failing children, no depression or mental illness, no drug addicts or alcoholics. “The only problems we have, Mamush, are loss of faith and culture and maybe having too many American friends.”

[Samuel] used to say that Ethiopia was the best place in the world to die. “Everyone dies of natural causes,” he said. “A friend of my father’s was shot in the head by his wife. When we went to the funeral, his family cried and cried. ‘It’s such a shame,’ they said. ‘He was such a good husband. He died of a heart attack in his sleep.'”

The novel demands much of the reader: one has to be prepared for the quintessential unreliable narrator, for mysteries to emerge but never be resolved, and to wander back and forth in time without always knowing what moment is being described. Samuel has written a manuscript, Mamush is working on one, so is the book we are reading one of those two? Or is it Mamush’s interpretation of Samuel’s novel, or something inbetween? Non-linearity can be interesting, but is often simply confusing, and so it is in this case.

In college, Mamush’s friend Claire (one of the many characters who appears, seems to play an important part, but then disappears for the rest of the novel) says:

Sometimes I look at you and think that things go right through you. You’re like a donut. There’s a hole in the middle, where something solid should be.

The same could be said about this novel.