Right at the beginning of this enigmatic, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, mystifying, and surreal book, the author states that it is at least partially based on fact, but “to keep the lawyers cooling their heels,” the “whole thing has been fitted with a fiction overcoat.” He emphasizes that if he is pressed on the issue, he would swear that he “made it all up. Even if it really happened.” This reminded me of another book that I read a few years ago called I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, in which the autobiographical elements create verisimilitude for the more flamboyant, obviously fictional parts.

The narrator of People Like Us is a novelist who has recently won what he refers to as “The Big One,” the National Book Award, just as the real author, Jason Mott, won the 2021 National Book Award for his novel Hell of a Book. I have not read Hell of a Book, but after reading a short summary, I realize that People Like Us seems to be a sort of sequel to it, using the same structure and some of the same characters. Like its predecessor, People Like Us alternates its primary narration with third-person accounts of a character named Soot who is also an author and a doppelganger of the narrator. Soot’s story, though, is suffused with tragedy, full of school shootings and divorce and suicide, while the first-person narrator, although he is pursued by a psychotic surrealistic character named Rufus who is trying to kill him, and although he has become paranoid and carries a loaded gun wherever he goes, has a more light-hearted tone – or at least he adopts a light-hearted tone to cover the overwhelming angst he continually feels. After winning “The Big One,” the narrator is invited on a European book tour by a French billionaire. In his story, he blocks out the billionaire’s real name (for legal purposes, he claims) and calls him Frenchie. He also nicknames other major characters: Frenchie’s bodyguard becomes the Goon, and Frenchie’s secretary becomes the Kid.

Frenchie is so wealthy that money is completely irrelevant to him, and he offers to support the narrator in a lavish lifestyle, in other words with so much cash that he’d want for nothing, so that he can spend his full time writing without having to worry about his financial well-being. There’s only one catch: he can never return to the States. He must live in permanent exile. Considering the horror stories in the Soot sections of the story, this would seem to be a no-brainer; after all, the United States has become, for the narrator as well as for Soot, a hellhole full of traumatic memories. There is one scene in Paris in which famous Black expatriate writers, over drinks and snacks, extol on how great they feel after leaving the United States behind. In response to this, the Kid (who is an American expatriate) has a fit and runs off into the darkness screaming in perplexity, wondering why they don’t all instead return to the States and try to fix it.

Throughout both story threads are surrealistic elements. For instance, some memories are so graphic that they are referred to as time travel; in addition, the narrator has visions of things that may or may not really be there, and one of the characters, a woman named Kelly, can hear the narrator’s thoughts as if through telepathy. There is also the question of the title. Who does he mean when he refers to “people like us”? He comes back to this conundrum over and over in alternate renderings; besides “people like us” he points out “someone like me,” “people like you,” “not like you,” and so on. Each time the phrases are used, they seem to refer to different groups. For example: writers who have won major awards; writers in general; all creative people; Black people; famous Black people; Black writers; displaced people without homelands; everyone. The phrase continues to shape-shift all the way to the final paragraphs of the last page, and the plot (which, remember, may or may not be true) continues to twist until the end. All in all, People Like Us is an entertaining, albeit somewhat depressing, read; I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions about its denouement.