OMNIVOROUS READER

Jason Mott gets one thing out of the way right off the bat in People Like Us — his latest novel is semi-fictional. Or at least that’s what the National Book Award-winning author of Hell of a Book wants you to believe.

“Whole fistfuls of this actually happened, sister!” he tells us in the forward. “So, to keep the lawyers cooling their heels instead of kicking down the front door with those high-priced Italian loafers of theirs, some names and places have been given the three-card monte treatment and this whole damned thing has been fitted with a fictional overcoat.”

People Like Us is the story of two Black authors — one on tour in the wintry climes of Minnesota after a school shooting, and the other being chauffeured around Europe, or “Euroland,” as he calls it, as the guest of a super-wealthy benefactor we know only as “Frenchie.”

They’re both exploring the idea of the American dream and whether such a notion is truly attainable within the confines of their lives. One is pondering that question from inside U.S. borders, the other from the outside.

Readers likely will notice many parallels between the real life of the acclaimed Columbus County resident and UNC Wilmington professor who’s a five-time author now. Mott started writing People Like Us as a memoir that delved into his relationship with America.

But along the way a couple of his Hell of a Book characters — Soot and The Kid — kept dropping into his story. So it evolved into this description-defying, pseudo-memoir/novel that will make you laugh out loud at its devilishly delicious humor, then sink into the grave realization that Mott is deftly addressing some serious social commentary.

Because both protagonists feel compelled to travel with concealed weapons, the gun culture in America and abroad is one such theme. So is the precarious state of the nation.

Mott is not preachy about these topics. He is subtle and inviting as he gets readers to think about American identity, and the complexities that Black Americans confront in a land where racial “othering” still exists.

One of the beauties of his writing is he can turn a phrase that will stop you dead in your tracks and force you to linger for a minute or two to admire his imagination, wit and way with words. Mott describes a scene about a seismic shift on a par with the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd this way: “It was like watching Sisyphus — a man who never skips leg day — finally get that super-size rock of his farther up the hill than he ever did before. And, just for a second, you can believe that, hell, maybe he’ll finally get it over the top.”

Mott’s prose will take you on a madcap adventure or somber journey with a cast of intriguing characters. We reconnect with Soot, the character in Hell of a Book who becomes invisible or one of “The Unseen” after witnessing his father shot by police while out on a jog. He’s an author now, in Minnesota, reckoning with the suicide death of his daughter, Mia, amid the aftermath of a school shooting.

Then there’s The Kid, who is older than he was in Hell of a Book, mysteriously seizure-prone now, living in France and going by the name Dylan — or at least the author living it up bourgeois-style in Europe believes the two are one and the same despite being told otherwise.

We get to know The Goon, the giant Black Scottish bodyguard and driver employed by the eccentric Frenchie to squire around the nameless author in a Citroën so decrepit and aged it seems like it’s “about to pull a hamstring.” 

Dylan is with them as they go from book event to book event in Italy and France. Along the way, the author, who sometimes pretends to be the better-known Colson Whitehead or Ta-Nehisi Coates, runs into Kelly, a funeral director and former girlfriend from the States. She hops in with the trio as the four of them seek a “Brown Man’s Paradise.”

Just as the gun used in an accidental shooting toward the end of the book hangs suspended in air “like a steel question mark,” so too does the notion of whether leaving America, as Mott poses, “just might be the new American dream.”

Dylan, who fled to “Euroland,” sheds light on that idea in deep conversation with the author, who is debating himself whether a comfortable home can really be had outside the homeland for people like him.

“There’s a hierarchy here, just like everywhere,” Dylan told him. “You’re either French-born White or Italian-born White or English-born White or Whatever-born Whatever . . . or you’re an Other. Well, where do the Others go? What do you do when your home doesn’t love you and all the other homes you tried to make a life in don’t love you either?”

That question lingers as Mott wraps People Like Us, fodder for one more semi-fictional book.