Reading Into How to Read The Air

By Betsy Mikel in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 26, 2010 6:40PM

My idea of a road trip conjures up the image of a typical American family driving a typical American car on a typical American highway. The first page of How to Read The Air perfectly mirrors every aspect of that image. There’s a seven-year-old Monte Carlo, a 484-mile trip from Peoria to Nashville, and Josef and Miriam, an immigrant couple from Ethiopia who are doing their best to look, speak and feel American. But this road trip is just the start of what is a complex but finely woven story about a series of journeys. How to Read The Air not only describes the couple’s physical journey, but also that of their son and narrator Jonas, who decides to retrace their steps thirty years later. Along the way, both Jonas and his parents reflect on the past and present and how their experiences have shaped the people they have become.

As he describes his parents’ trip, Jonas uses his own imagination to fill in the blanks between the truths. We learn that Jonas is both accustomed to making up stories as well blocking out painful experiences and memories. And so he becomes a very interesting narrator; we do not know how much of his story to believe. Yet this hardly matters. Even though How to Read The Air is a piece of fiction, the characters, their emotions and their experiences feel human. Jonas is a great storyteller, and by that I mean Dinaw Mengestu, the author who created him, is a great storyteller. I spoke with Mengestu, who grew up in the Chicago suburbs, about the characters and story he created in writing How to Read The Air.

Dinaw Mengestu, will be reading from How to Read the Air at the Lincoln Park Borders at 7 p.m. tonight.

Chicagoist: How much of your own experience did you fold into How to Read The Air?

Dinaw Mengestu: The book definitely draws on key places in my own life. We only lived in Peoria for six years, but it struck me and I’ve held onto it since then. Chicago is a very Midwestern town and someday thought I would have some way to write about that landscape because it was key to where I grew up. But all the key plot points don’t really mimic my own life. We had a happy American childhood, I’ve never been a high school teacher, I’ve never had this desire to make stuff up, and I’ve never been divorced.

C: I haven’t read The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears [Mengestu’s first book], but I have read that it touches on the “American dream.” How to Read the Air seems to touch on that theme as well. What do you think the American Dream means to people reading your books?

DM: It’s a question I hear a lot in Europe: “What are you telling us about the American dream?” I didn’t realize how much of a fascination there is with this. We’re really the only country that has this sense of having a dream attached to it. In some places, there is this superficial level of acquisition of home, car, level of financial comfort. The more critical element is having a place in your community and an emotional and physical attachment that makes you feel whole and complete. The characters in both my novels reject the material or physical aspects of the American dream because they lack the emotional aspects.

C: I love the blurring of fact and fiction in this book. It’s especially interesting because most readers I talk to either prefer to read strictly fiction or strictly nonfiction. Do you think people who stick to one genre are missing out?

DM: I would say yes. People always ask novelists what is true in the novel, and I think it comes from mistrust or insecurity of what is happening in the novel. That question misses the point of what fiction is. Even though it is an invented narrative, I often feel as close to a character in a fictional novel as a character in a memoir. Novelists invest as much weight, depth and insight as they possibly can, and that character is real. Oftentimes fiction is more real than nonfiction. It is an argument for the necessity of imagination. If you can’t imagine the story, then you lack an ability to empathize.

C: There’s so much woven together in How to Read the Air… being an immigrant and being a child of an immigrant, falling in love and falling out of love, success and failure, the future and the past, Ethiopia and the United States…. Parallels seem to pop up everywhere. How did you decide what was going in and what was staying out?

DM: Fortunately I never knew what I was going to put. Some writers have strong sense of where the novel is going. I don’t. I knew there was this narrator who was trying to imagine this road trip of his parents, but as that relationship started to evolve, I saw there was a parallel narrative between him and his parents, and I had to have this dialogue between the present day and past. Once that became clear, all those echoes and parallels that happen between the marriages, the trips, between generations evolved. None of them had to be deliberately created. If you try too hard to create the echoes, the reader would have felt they would have been forced. The parallels would ring false. That is definitely part of the novel, but it has to emerge kind of subtly.

C: I know that you intentionally left the title open for interpretation. Can you speak at all about how you came to this title?

DM: There’s a line in the book where Jonas is describing his father and how he learns to read the air for disturbance. Once I wrote that sentence, I knew it would be the title. It also related to the epigraph. There’s a strong parallel between his father thinking he can sense the violence and vibrations in the air. So there’s an equation between those two that felt sort of meaningful. And as the book progresses, there’s a certain failure of language between his wife and between Josef and Miriam. It’s about leaving some of the emptiness you can bear.