Charles Dickens, Meet Dinaw Mengestu

DH: On my main library shelves sits a massive edition of Dickens, still awaiting completion.  And when I look at those intricately conceived word feasts, I am reminded that a lot of that story stuff first reached its readers in the form of installments in some scruffy periodical.

How quaint, reading a mag by gaslight to find out what’s going to happen to little Dorrit! But when eras do axial shifts, the quaint can be transformed into the cool. Why can’t our e-readers function that way?

Why can’t I arrange for Brad Watson to e-text me his latest story as soon as he has written it? And why can’t BW say, two weeks after that: “Oh, I revised it, dear reader. Here’s the new version. Which do you like best?

And why can’t I read Claire Messud’s new novel that way, by chapter installments. And if CM wants to do a take-back, because she’s decided to move her story in a different direction, what’s wrong with that? I can take it. In fact, I’d like it. There are “Seven Types of Ambiguity” in language anyway, according to William Empson. Why isn’t the writer…or the reader…allowed to change their mind? I’d rather buy the right to access the writer’s brain, who wouldn’t, than buy any particular static work. Don’t you get it? It’s “showin your skills” that’s the most admirable part…not the end result of those skills.

DM’s, the great DM’s, new novel “How to Read the Air” is divided into three parts and for once I am going to take these authorial Mason Dixon lines seriously and provide three reviews of which this is the first. It’s three attempts at being a good reader (and blogger).

“How to Read” arcs two parallel plots over about 300 pages. But it’s like a double helix. For each parallel plot has two phases. What the reader construes is really happening and how the central character, Jonas Woldemarian, is spinning it out. For this is a novel where lying is a compulsive survival strategy. Jonas lies to survive psychologically. But the characters are all weaving central fantasies into their lives. Dinaw Mengestu shows us how the stories we tell ourselves to get by and the stories writers give us as formal art, are just different phases of the same humane performance.

DM makes for an embattled author. His narrative voice, full of a suppressed pathos, comes up with amazing conditional voices as his detached third person narration slips into being Jonas and then slips out again. My favorite voice is what I’d call the “voluntary conditional”. It’s “I’d like to say this is what happened.” It’s a great way for DM to be Jonas and still be able to relate events at which the character was not present. He actually uses it to relate events in the life of Jonas’ mother, Mariam, that occur when she is pregnant with the son who is narrating the story.

All lovers of books discover those moments in literature that they will never forget, as if they were pivotal events in their own lives. I will never forget Mariam, in the opening of this novel, as I remember my own mother, waiting in her bedroom, stalling, refusing to go down to the car where her husband is impatiently waiting to begin an irrational trip to Nashville from the Midwest, a three-year deferred “honeymoon.” Mariam’s stalling; it’s passive aggression, part of the near constant war between her and her husband, Yosef. A war that leaves her battered and making “pretend” rehearsals of escape once her son Jonas is able to walk. Imagine your mother appearing with a suitcase and taking you as a child on a pretend trip to St. Louis. It’s practice at escapism. seeing how far you can get in a country you only dimly understand in a language you can barely speak. But Mariam and her son Jonas make “negative” progress. With each attempt they get a little farther away from Yosef before Mariam decides it’s time to head back to the starting point.

There are no “what will happen next” secrets to reveal in Mengestu’s masterful storytelling. The narrator already mentions, parenthetically, where everyone is going to end up. Rather, “How to Read the Air” is a brilliant attempt at emotional excavation. What survives? What survives every and any attempt to destroy it? What survives attempts to lie it away or batter it to death because it hurts so much? Whatever remains, that’s the truth. Stay tuned for another two posts on Dinaw Mengestu’s INCANDESCENT narrative skill.

As a bonus, here’s a video of an interview with DM after the release of his previous book The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears: