MixedFull StopDinaw Mengestu’s second novel, How to Read the Air, is frustratingly hard to get into ... Mengestu’s picture of disintegrating relationships and emotional trauma—focused by slow tales of romantic death and reflected in refugee histories that turn up throughout the book—hits home pretty hard, and ultimately makes the book worth reading. But How to Read the Air never really gets off the ground. Mengestu’s explanatory style not only weighs down what should be the fiercest and freest moments of the book, but keeps us from discovering the story’s insights on our own ... It’s not bad writing, not exactly, but it just doesn’t feel fresh ... he book sometimes reads more like a memoir, or even an undergraduate paper, than a novel. There’s too much exposition, too much analysis, and not enough of the action and accidental insight that can make a novel both fun to read and moving.
