Stranger in the City

In The Enigma of Arrival, V.S. Naipaul's autobiographical narrator, a Trinidadian of Indian ancestry, finds himself living in the British countryside: "The idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate." Sepha Stephanos, the Ethiopian shopkeeper who narrates Dinaw Mengestu's graceful first novel, has Naipaul's A Bend in the River behind his counter and a similar affinity for dilapidated surroundings--not the countryside but Washington, DC's Logan Circle: "Four- and five-story mansions that had once belonged to someone of great import--a president's cousin, or aunt, or maybe nephew--but that over the years had been neglected, burned out, or in my case, divided into cheap, sometimes cockroach-infested apartments.... I loved the circle for what it had become: proof that wealth and power were not immutable, and America was not always so great after all."

The Naipaul novel was a gift from Joseph, a Congolese would-be intellectual who, with Kenneth, a Kenyan immigrant, visits Sepha's shabby convenience store every Tuesday, where they drink whiskey and quiz one another on the violent upheavals of the continent they left as young men--"Name a dictator and then guess the year and country." ("When we stop having coups, we can stop playing," says Joseph.) They had met while working as bellhops at the Capitol Hotel seventeen years earlier, soon after Sepha fled the "red terror" at home. Their lives have not been without success since then--Joseph is a waiter at "the premier eating establishment of the District's elite," Kenneth has a job as an engineer, Sepha has his store--but they have been subjected to "enough mockery and humiliation to last us well beyond our lifetimes" and have long since relinquished their faith in the American Dream.

Logan Circle, however, is on the mend. New customers come into the store looking for bottled water, and once-boarded windows that formerly obscured crack addicts and homeless men now feature "curtains provocatively peeled back to reveal a warmly lit room with forest green couches, modern silver lamps that craned their necks like swans, and sleek glass coffee tables with fresh flowers bursting on top." Sepha had been drawn to the neighborhood because "I didn't have to be anything greater than what I already was," but he greets the regeneration with hope--hope that his failing business will be buoyed by the rising tide and that his life might come to include two of the people it bears: Judith, a professor of American political history who has given up on her marriage and academic career, and her precocious young daughter, Naomi, who claims Sepha's friendship easily (they read The Brothers Karamazov together) and whose "lighter than black but darker than white" skin is less like her mother's than his own. Sepha's account of the defeat of those hopes, over the course of five months, provides the novel's narrative frame.

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