Recently named one of the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers to watch, Dinaw Mengestu garnered an impressive collection of awards and critical accolades for his first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), including the Guardian First Book Prize and a National Book Foundation Award. The delicately constructed How to Read the Air--a quiet but resonant study of identity, place and marriage--is an excellent second novel, sure to solidify his reputation as a talented and important new writer.
Mengestu's deceptively simple storyline provides the perfect vehicle for the author to explore complicated themes of dislocation, alienation and perhaps most important, whether or not there exists an objective or quantifiable truth in human actions and relationships. The narrator is Jonas Woldemarian, who, much like the author, is the Illinois-raised son of Ethiopian immigrant parents. A few months before his birth, Jonas's parents, Yosef and Mariam, took an ill-fated road trip/honeymoon from Peoria to Nashville. Jonas's imagined reinvention of this trip forms one narrative thread. The slow disintegration of Jonas's own marriage (to Angela, whom he'd met when both were working at a refugee resettlement center in Manhattan) first parallels and then joins that thread when Jonas decides to leave Angela and his teaching job and retrace his parents' journey in an effort to understand himself better and become a happier person.
The marriage of Yosef and Mariam, Jonas explains, was doomed from the start. Begun in war-torn Ethiopia, their relationship couldn't survive the relative tranquility of their new home and neither one was ever able to fully adopt or adapt to the culture they found in America. It is Yosef who knows "how to read the air," detecting electrical changes in the atmosphere before violence occurs. Ironically, it is Yosef who perpetrates the violence here, regularly beating Mariam--so forcefully at the beginning of their journey that she loses consciousness. Thirty years later, it is not violence that afflicts Jonas's marriage, but his inability to reveal his true self; an emotional stuntedness that causes him to fictionalize his life (he lies often and with great ease) and retreat from his wife. Eventually all the Woldemarians become estranged--from each other and from themselves.
Mengestu's language is beautiful--clear, evocative, and rhythmic--and each one of his characters is deeply realized. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment with this novel, however, is how he layers deception and truth within the narrative, building to a conclusion that feels inevitable even as it surprises.--Debra Ginsberg
Shelf Talker: A beautifully crafted novel from prize-winning Dinaw Mengestu that follows the complicated relationships of two generations of Ethiopian immigrants in America.