A book that tells a story beyond its pages

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.

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.”