The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Mengestu, Dinaw. (2006). The beautiful things that heaven bears. New York: Riverhead Books.

 A wonderful read.

Mengestu has a fine ear for the way immigrants from damaged places talk in the sanctuary of their own company, free from the exhausting courtesies of self-anthropologizing explanation. He gets, pitch perfect, the warmly abrasive wit of the violently displaced and their need to keep alive some textured memories — even memories that wound — amid America’s demanding amnesia. Mengestu understands the threats these men face, not least the threat of expectations. Ken can finally afford to buy himself some dental work that would help him assimilate upward, but he chooses not to: “ ‘You can never forget where you came from if you have teeth as ugly as these,’ he said. He grinned once more. He tapped a slightly brown front tooth for effect.”

Sparely described, yet fully so, Joe from Congo and Ken from Kenya are magnificent characters that round out the male side, and the African side, of Stephanos.

What more potent setting is there than Washington for a novel about the architecture of hope and memory? As Stephanos wanders, Bloom-like, down back streets and broad avenues, he takes in both the neglected statuary that attempts to do the official work of remembrance and the anonymous heroisms of ordinary people, unnoticed by anyone but a neighbor or a storekeeper or a child. Mengestu also widens his canvas by giving the novel a romantic turn, reviving an old plot device: a stranger comes to town.

All they ever share, physically, Stephanos and Judith, is a kiss; spiritually they are reluctant to get closer.

It’s rare that a novelist who can comfortably take on knotty political subjects like exile, memory and class conflict is also able to write with wisdom, wit and tenderness about the frisson of romance. Mengestu skillfully sketches the precarious attraction between Stephanos and Judith, but his portrait of the bond between Stephanos and Naomi is even more extraordinary. In our culture’s rigid judgment, a friendship between an 11-year-old girl and a 36-year-old man is creepy by default. The bravest thing about Mengestu’s novel is the way he pours such deep, nonsexual yearning into this relationship, which is life-saving for Stephanos and Naomi alike.

It is a beautiful relationship that has substance and elan.

Again and again, Stephanos’s story makes us consider what it means to be displaced: from a local community, from a distant nation, from a love you had hoped to settle into. In Mengestu’s work, there’s no such thing as the nondescript life. He notices, and there are whole worlds in his noticing. He has written a novel for an age ravaged by the moral and military fallout of cross-cultural incuriosity. In a society slick with “truthiness” — and Washington may be the capital of that — there’s something hugely hopeful about this young writer’s watchful honesty and egalitarian tenderness. This is a great African novel, a great Washington novel and a great American novel.

Amen. 'Tis indeed.