Hot young Ethiopian-American author Dinaw Mengestu has just published his second novel, How to Read the Air. (David Burnett/Penguin Group)

Dinaw Mengestu writes in the grand tradition of the American novel, but as his name suggests, he’s not your average American novelist. The Ethiopian-born, U.S.-raised writer brings a fresh spin to old tropes by virtue of his immigrant background.

'I didn’t want this to be perceived as another African or Ethiopian-immigrant novel. This is a novel that is very much a part of an American literary tradition.'

— Dinaw Mengestu

His artful second book, How to Read the Air, both pays homage to and subverts the classic road novel. At its centre is a trip taken by Yosef and Mariam, a young Ethiopian couple who climb into their red Chrysler Monte Carlo one autumn day in 1977 to drive from their home in Peoria, Ill., and visit the country-music capital of Nashville, Tenn. What transpires, however, is not your typical journey into the heart of the American Dream, but a near-tragic misadventure that presages a profoundly unhappy marriage.

Mengestu, who cites Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as one of his formative reading experiences, says his appropriation of the road genre was deliberate. Sitting down for a late-morning interview during the recent International Festival of Authors in Toronto, the charming and loquacious author explains that his sophomore novel was partly designed to free him from the “immigrant fiction” pigeonhole following his much-lauded 2007 debut, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. That book dealt with the harrowing memories of an Ethiopian refugee working as a grocer in Washington, D.C.

“I didn’t want this to be perceived as another African or Ethiopian-immigrant novel,” says the 32-year-old Mengestu, whom The New Yorker anointed this summer as one of the “20 Under 40” best young fiction writers in the U.S. “This is a novel that is very much a part of an American literary tradition. Even if the characters are African, they’re still existing inside of an American context, and this is an American novel as much as anything else.”

How to Read the Air is actually three road novels in one. Yosef and Mariam’s excursion is simultaneously related and re-created by Jonas, the couple’s only son and the book’s narrator. An aimless and deeply troubled young man, Jonas leaves his wife, Angela, and his job teaching English at a New York private school in order to retrace Yosef and Mariam’s ill-fated trip 30 years later. Jonas believes it holds the key to his parents’ dysfunctional relationship, which has left him a scarred and wary adult.

(Penguin Group)

Then there is the third journey in the book: Yosef’s perilous escape from Ethiopia, via Sudan, in the wake of the 1974 communist coup d’état that toppled Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. Jonas ends up recounting his father’s tale to his spellbound English class – albeit with the embellishments of a compulsive storyteller and habitual liar.

“He’s a very shifty narrator,” Mengestu says with a smile. “At some point he calls the reader’s attention to the fact that he is making things up, that this is artifice. In telling his parents’ stories, he’s very aware of the fact that he’s constructing this narrative out of his imagination, because he couldn’t have known any of it, he wasn’t even born.

“The novel plays with what’s real and not real,” her adds, “but of course, it’s also taking place in a world that is totally fabricated to begin with.”

Well, perhaps not totally. There are plenty of details in the novel drawn from Mengestu’s own memories and family background. His father also fled Ethiopia after the coup. An employee of Ethiopian Airlines based in the capital of Addis Ababa, he sought asylum in Italy while on a business trip. His family, including the two-year-old Dinaw, joined him later. They settled in Peoria and Mengestu’s dad, like Yosef, worked in a factory there.

His parents likely even took a road trip to Nashville, Mengestu says. “When I was a child, there used to be a [souvenir] cup in our house that said ‘Nashville, Tennessee.’ So I knew at some point in time, a journey had happened.”

Where the book diverges wildly from Mengestu’s own life is in its jarring early revelation that Yosef is physically abusive to his wife and son. When I mention the theme of domestic violence, Mengestu is surprised. “No one ever asks me about that,” he says. “The origin of that violence is very political, it’s violence that’s being transplanted from Africa to America.”

Yosef’s behaviour clearly has its roots in his brutal experiences as a political prisoner and a refugee. “There will definitely be a way in which that kind of violence will later be expressed,” Mengestu says. “I’m not trying to excuse [Yosef] by any measure, but at the same time, he couldn’t be just this demonized man, he also had to have some context for which his violence exists.”

Jonas uses his storytelling as a way of coming to grips with his father’s past, as well as to try to define his own identity – a struggle Mengestu is personally familiar with. Raised in Peoria, where his family belonged to an otherwise all-white Southern Baptist church, he says he spent his childhood trying to figure out to which country and culture he belonged.

“Now I’ve accepted that both landscapes and cultures have formed me,” he says, “and if somebody wants to see me as belonging to one or the other, that’s for them to decide. It has no relevance to my sense of who I am.”

Mengestu went on to take degrees from Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown University and Columbia University in New York, where he began forging his career as a writer. It was not until 2005 that he finally went back to Ethiopia, 25 years after he had left. He says he felt warmly accepted there, “but then there was another part of me that was completely an outsider.”

Since then, his sideline as a freelance journalist has taken him repeatedly to Africa. He has reported on the wars in northern Uganda and Sudan’s Darfur region for such magazines as Harper’s and Rolling Stone, and spent this summer in Rwanda and eastern Congo on assignment for Granta. His time in Africa has left him with mixed feelings about Western aid initiatives. On the subject of Bono and Bob Geldof’s recent efforts to tout Africa as the 21st century’s economic powerhouse, he’s at once supportive and skeptical.

“Obviously, anything that encourages progress and development in Africa is great,” he says. “At the same time, a lot of the conversation that comes out of these efforts is oftentimes very sentimental and reductive. It’s never as simple as just going in and giving money and aid. African lives and politics are just as complicated as any other nation’s.”

For the last three years, Mengestu has lived in Paris, where he met and married his wife, Anne-Emmanuelle. The couple has two small boys, who have been staying with Mengestu’s parents in Virginia while he does his North American promotional tour for How to Read the Air.

Mengestu says his father is retired now, while his mother works for the U.S. government. Unlike the tragic Yosef and Miriam, they seem to have found the American Dream. “They’re together, they’re happy,” he says. “They have a nice little house in the suburbs.”

How to Read the Air is published by Penguin and is in stores now.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.