Dinaw Mengestu was recently included in the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" hit list, and for good reason.
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The narrator and main character of Mengestu's second novel, "How to Read the Air," is named Jonas Woldemariam. We meet Jonas as he travels to Fort Laconste, a landmark that his late father and mother had visited three months prior to his birth. He is taking the trip in an effort to reconnect with them. We learn later that Jonas is also taking this trip after having separated from his wife, Angela. Throughout the long drive from New York to Tennessee, Jonas recalls and reflects on the details of his and Angela's relationship, the lives of his parents during and before their marriage and the events of his own life.
Mengestu's writing is engrossing. He has a deep understanding of character development and a talent for exposing the strengths and weaknesses of people. Jonas, for instance, is an infinitely fascinating character — a man who, after a childhood marked by domestic violence, has conditioned himself to affect an almost complete indifference to the people and events around him. Ingeniously, though, this cold, calculated tone translates into his narration, and therefore the style of "How to Read the Air" itself, without completely alienating the reader.
We are saved from this fate by virtue of the counterpoint to Jonas' indifference — Angela. The sections where Jonas and Angela interact — whether in the basement of the apartment they come to share in Alphabet City, or the firm where they first meet — are the most interesting parts of the book. They show us Angela's ability to understand Jonas. It seems that she knows the truth: that Jonas really does feel things all the time, and is just too afraid to show it.
These sections are where all that catharsis you might have been wondering about comes in. As we realize from the very first sentence of the novel, Jonas has already left Angela. No matter how much we adore them together, or just want to reach in and tell them to behave differently to each other, we are as much victims of dramatic irony as Jonas himself.
Mengestu has hidden a great, tragic love story inside a novel that deals with much weightier themes: domestic violence, immigration, paternal abandonment, African genocide, race relations and a host of other modern crises in our daily lives. And, strangely timely, a friendly holiday message awaits at the conclusion of the novel, as Jonas fantasizes about gathering his mother, his father and Angela — in other words his family, whatever it might have been — in the same room. He says that he would put his arms around them and say, "If anything at all matters, it's this."
