Published by Dutton on August 5, 2025
Jason Mott’s fourth novel, Hell of a Book, won a National Book Award. So did the protagonist of People Like Us. Soot calls the National Book Award the real N-word because uttering it might hurt book sales. I don’t know how well People Like Us will sell given the American reading public’s preference for genre fiction over literary fiction, but People Like Us tells an engaging story that open-minded readers should enjoy.
Soot has experienced the tragedy of a daughter’s death by her own hand. A moving soliloquy spotlights his guilt at surviving her death, his recognition that the world kept spinning despite his grief, his inability to understand why he sometimes has a good day in her absence. When Soot meets a kid at a book signing who is grieving over the deaths of classmates killed in a school shooting, “Soot just signs the book and offers the kid a smile and he hopes it’s enough.” But nothing is ever enough and, at the same time, nothing stops the world from spinning.
Despite its European setting, gun violence in America is a central theme of People Like Us. Soot flashes back to an orientation video at a college campus in South Carolina that not only teaches students the appropriate response to an active shooter alert, but encourages students and their parents to believe that active shooters are everywhere. In another flashback, Soot attends a school drill that trains students to hide in metal boxes called “Safe Spaces” when an active shooter appears. While the novel makes the point that hurricanes are more likely to harm students than a school shooter, another character experiences blackouts that are apparently triggered by stressful memories of trying to text his mother during a school shooting. It isn’t paranoia that drives fear of school shooters, even if society’s protective responses are over the top.
Of course, American gun violence isn’t restricted to schools. A woman named Kelly fled to Europe from her American hospital job because she was tired of seeing so many young men brought down by bullets. Soot put into practice the lesson of the video at his daughter’s campus — “sometimes escape is the best weapon” — when he moved to Europe, but he learned that guns are not the only weapon that an enemy might wield. A man named Remus has threatened to kill Soot and, as he follows Soot around Europe, he almost does.
The Remus subplot is puzzling. I suppose Remus advances the theme of violence, if only because it forces Soot to consider whether his own fascination with guns makes him any safer. Yet Remus' motivation is never made clear. He seems content to have proven a point by exposing Soot's fear and goading him into a violent act that harms another character, but the act seems to have none of the consequences that the reader might expect.
Soot has a history of interacting with a kid who apparently isn’t there, unless he’s invisible to everyone else. In France, a billionaire (Soot calls him Frenchie) offers Soot a huge sum of money that he can keep if he doesn’t ever return to America. Why he does this is another "why" that the story doesn't answer. The billionaire has an assistant named Dylan. Soot is convinced that Dylan is the invisible kid, a role Dylan has no interest in assuming. While the Dylan is a less puzzling character than Remus, his role in the story is also a bit murky.
The novel’s larger theme is home. What does the concept of “home” mean to Black Americans whose ancestors were slaves? They can go to Africa in search of their roots, but they won’t recognize the language or culture. It won’t feel like home. They can stay in the city of their birth but white racists still won’t accept them as belonging in the country. They might face less discrimination in Europe, but they are still regarded as belonging to the Other, together with all the other nonwhite Europeans. Dylan is jealous of Jamaicans because they have a country they can call home. If home is where you fit, where is home if you are constantly made to feel that you don’t fit anywhere?
Perhaps home is the place where you feel at peace. Soot feels peaceful in Frenchie’s library, spending his days reading books with Dylan and Kelly and Frenchie’s African-Scottish assistant Goon. Locked away from reality, Soot wonders if he should make this his home, even if he must leave America behind. And he comes to understand that we don’t find home by looking for it. It isn’t even where we decide to stay. We find home by waking every day and deciding not to leave.
One of the most telling themes contrasts the desire to fix things with the reality that we can’t fix everything. Perhaps the inability to fix the world explains the novel’s multiple suicides. Perhaps people give up in the face of futility. As Soot wrote about an uncle who ended his own life: “He lived with the need to fix the world churning in his belly, weighing him down, keeping him tethered to this earth when, in some other life, if that ball of grief wasn’t there, he’d literally be able to fly. Maybe each day he struggled with wishing the world was one way, but waking up, again and again, to see it be a different way.” We can only fix ourselves, the story seems to say, and we can’t always do that. If we fail, maybe death is the home we seek, the place where we finally find peace.
The themes are bleak but the story is not oppressive. Jason Mott peppers the novel with humor. Nor does he leave the reader without hope. Soot has always been afraid of people. He feels safest when he’s alone. He craves invisibility. Yet by the novel’s end, when Soot admits he is the author’s alter ego, he comes to realize the importance of facing his fears. Maybe the way to “fit” into a place is to embrace others who share the same fears, to build a community of more than one. People Like Us — people who share those fears — tells a rich, sometimes funny, and ultimately heartwarming story about what it means to feel unwelcome and what we can do to ease the burdens of others (and perhaps our own) even if we can’t fix the world.
RECOMMENDED
Monday, August 11, 2025 at 8:52AM 
