People Like Us
A Novel
Literacy specialists and advocates for more equitable representation in book publishing frequently use the metaphors of mirrors and windows to discuss literature’s power to connect with diverse readers. Fiction can provide opportunities for readers or listeners to reflect on their own experiences (mirrors) and to gain perspective on others’ experiences (windows). They are useful metaphors for promoting a diverse array of stories and perspectives. But they break down when pushed: ultimately, windows are inevitably mirrors and vice versa.
James Baldwin’s famous Life magazine quote, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” speaks to this connecting dynamic. So does Bob Dylan’s lyrically cubist “Tangled Up in Blue,” where “every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal,” but “we always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view.” Less well known to some, perhaps, is the exploration of similarity and difference in Christopher Isherwood’s landmark short novel, A Single Man. The novel meditates for a time on the recognition that if the stories we encountered only presented utter sameness, we would find little value in reading them. Isherwood’s story alerts us to understanding that even if what we hold in common with one another is profound, commonality is not always relevant to the moment.
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Jason Mott’s People Like Us dances through these windows and mirrors with alacrity, joy, and grief. It provokes questions of meaning and mortality, individuality, identity, community, and the meaning of home with a richness and complexity making for a proper novel and not a manifesto. It’s a book that works on you even when you’re not reading it. To use the language of Dannagal Goldthwaite Young’s typology of core human dispositions, People Like Us favors cognition over closure. Although it contains and alludes to moments of tragic irrevocability, little if anything ties up neatly. This aspect makes the book helpfully available to the reader for imagining the story outside the boundaries of the printed one. As the character Remus says in the novel, citing an unnamed source, “Don’t try to make simple that which was never meant to be simplified.”
Mott constructs the novel’s narrative antiphonally, largely between two Black American writers whose stories mostly transpire an ocean apart. The third-
person narrative of the writer on the west side of the Atlantic, Soot, presents meditations on personal and public tragedies and the ability to endure in a world where violence erupts unpredictably but regularly. The first-person narrative of the writer on a billionaire-
funded junket around “Euroland” presents an exuberant stranger-in-a-strange-land story that offers a complex answer to the question of whether, and for whom, “leaving America just might be the new American Dream.” The relationship between these two narrators is but one question Mott leaves open for readers to answer themselves.
I hasten, five paragraphs in, to acknowledge that People Like Us introduced me to Mott’s writing. Although it involves characters and allusions to storylines from Mott’s previous Hell of a Book, which won the National Book Award in 2021, nothing in Mott’s temporally inventive storytelling in People Like Us makes me suppose that he would object to anyone using it as an entry point. (As one of its protagonists concedes, “Can’t read ’em all,” right?) Still, Hell of a Book has joined my to-read shelf based on the strength and insights of People Like Us.
For readers inclined to play both inside and outside the written story, People Like Us provides an array of unreliable narrators, tricksters, and profound amounts of Ernest Hemingway’s proverbial subsurface iceberg underneath the visible story. Mott interlaces the real and the imaginative as productively as he handles the recognition that suffering contains the seeds of joy and vice versa, and the understanding that the things that appear to bring us safety or fulfillment also create for us the deepest kinds of vulnerability.
Delightfully, Mott presents fiction as simultaneously both utterly true and wildly inventive. More profoundly, perhaps, Mott’s readers get to see people like us both in mirrors and through windows—in both our common humanity and our unique individuality.
