Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man.
Mengestu skirts immigrant-literature clichés and paints a beautiful portrait of a complex, conflicted man struggling with questions of love and loyalty.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent.
Alone again, Sepha recalls his childhood in Addis Ababa, where, as a member of the upper class, he’d had high hopes for a different kind of life, before he witnessed his father’s murder and fled the country. But around the holidays, she suddenly leaves her house and sends Naomi to boarding school. As racial tensions grow in the neighborhood, Sepha wonders if he will be able to woo Judith. Judith begins to join them, and she and Sepha dance around the possibility of a romantic relationship. Naomi and Sepha strike up an unlikely friendship, and he spends evenings in the empty store with her, reading Dostoevsky. With the changes, though, comes Judith, a wealthy white woman, and Naomi, her enchanting biracial daughter. As an upscale clientele moves into the predominantly lower-class African-American neighborhood, Sepha’s business dwindles. Joseph and Kenneth graduated from Georgetown and went on to get higher degrees and well-paying jobs, while Sepha attended community college and then opened his store.
The trio-“Ken the Kenyan,” “Joe from the Congo” and Sepha, who was so skinny he didn’t need a nickname to remind them that he was Ethiopian-met as young hotel clerks when they first arrived in Washington, D.C., but since then, they have taken different paths.
After 17 years, an Ethiopian immigrant wonders to what extent he has become an American.Įvery Tuesday evening, three friends meet in the back room of Sepha Stephanos’s bedraggled Logan Circle convenience store to drink, give advice and wax philosophical about Africa, their mother continent.
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