Grief and the Impossibility of Changing the Past in People Like Us by Jason Mott

The Thematic Claim: Grief as a Failed Time Machine

In People Like Us, Jason Mott's novel builds its meditation on grief around a deceptively simple premise: Soot, a grieving father, claims he can travel through time. The novel never fully confirms or debunks this claim. Instead, it uses time travel as a metaphor for how grief operates — as a compulsive revisiting of moments that can never be altered. The thematic claim at the novel's heart is that grief distorts our perception of time, creating the illusion that if we could only return to the right moment, we might prevent the loss. The novel's answer, delivered through Mia's ghost and through Soot's own relentless reliving, is that some things cannot be undone, not even when redone.

The Time-Travel Confession: Memory Disguised as Magic

When Soot visits his ex-wife Tasha in Toronto, he tells her he has always been able to travel through time — to any point in his life, to relive it or watch himself. Tasha's response is immediate and deflating: “That's called memory, Soot.” But Soot insists it is not memory. He has checked everything, he says; they were good parents, they made the right decisions, it is not their fault. This scene establishes the novel's central tension: Soot's time travel is both a literal mechanism of the story and a psychological description of grief. He is not crazy, as he insists, but he is caught in a loop — revisiting every moment that led to Mia's death, searching for the one detail he could have changed.

Tasha refuses to play along. She tells him plainly that Mia is never coming back. She advises him to sell everything and leave before it kills him. But Soot cannot accept this. He leaves her house, and the narrator notes that there are no answers in forward, only the old question. This is the novel's first clear articulation of the theme: the future offers no resolution because grief keeps pulling him backward.

The Death Scene: Reliving What Cannot Be Redone

The novel's most harrowing passage is Soot's repeated return to the afternoon he found Mia's body. She had gone out beyond the grapevines, to the field between the muscadines and the family graves. The note on the door read simply “Out back. I love you. I'm sorry.” Soot's narration shifts between tenses as he stands on the porch, unable to know for a moment whether she is dead or merely sleeping in her favorite place. He hates himself for that moment of calm, for not knowing sooner.

The narrator tells us directly: “Some things can't be undone, not even when redone.” This is the novel's thesis statement. Soot pleads with Mia to get up, to come home, to not leave him. He promises they can go to Minnesota, that everything will be okay. But the scene always ends the same way. The hem of her dress flaps gently, waving at him, and the note will always read the same words. The repetition is the point: grief is the experience of being trapped in a moment that will not change no matter how many times you return to it.

The Hide-and-Seek Scene: The Past Refuses to Hold

In the novel's most structurally inventive scene, Soot plays hide-and-seek with his young daughter while dinner cooks. The domestic idyll is warm and funny — the bad jokes, the wife singing Alicia Keys, the daughter hiding in plain sight on the bed. But then the scene shifts. Mia is sixteen, wearing the dress he found her dead in. She asks if he gets sad, if it is because he is afraid. He asks what he can do to fix it. She tells him he cannot. He says he does not know how to live with that. She replies: “You don't get to choose.”

When he asks if they can stay in this time, she says no. Her explanation is the novel's most direct statement of its theme: he cannot fix the world or time, and people like them feel too much and want to fix too much, which sometimes swallows them up. The phrase “people like us” — which gives the novel its title — connects Soot's personal grief to a broader condition. The desire to fix, to repair, to undo is not a flaw in Soot alone; it is a shared human response to loss. And it is also, the novel suggests, a form of self-destruction.

The scene ends with Soot finding himself in Minnesota, Bolton, France, Italy, Toronto — everywhere he has been and will be. Mia asks why else he is writing this. The implication is that the novel itself is Soot's attempt at time travel — a way of revisiting the past that cannot change it but might, somehow, make it bearable.

The Search for a Cause: Blaming Vivian

Grief does not only distort time; it also distorts causality. In the scene at the river, Soot encounters Vivian, a woman who has come to kill herself. He becomes convinced that she is the origin point of Mia's death — that Vivian's despair will pass on to Mia, that this is where it starts. He accuses Vivian directly. Mia intervenes, insisting that Vivian stay, that her father was just leaving.

The narrator then reveals the future: Tasha and Vivian will become friends. Vivian will call Soot years later, weeping, asking if she gave Mia the idea, if she infected her. Soot will tell her no, and he will mean it. But eventually, he will have a moment when he thinks that maybe this was where it all started to go awry. He will try to blame Vivian, even though he knows it is not true. The narrator's conclusion is devastating: one person's sadness could not change his daughter any more than rain changes the path of the moon.

This passage shows grief's need for a culprit. If the loss can be traced to a single moment, a single person, then perhaps it could have been prevented. Soot's time travel is, in part, a search for that moment — the point of divergence where everything went wrong. But the novel insists that no such moment exists. Mia's death was not caused by one person's sadness or one bad decision. It was the result of a world that does not love him back, a world where school shootings and police stops and nightclubs produce a steady stream of grief.

The Gun and the Suspended Moment

The gun is the novel's most persistent symbol of the impossibility of changing the past. It is the instrument of Mia's death, the object Soot keeps loaded in his nightstand, the weapon that discharges and strikes Dylan through a windowpane. When Remus comes to kill Soot, the confrontation ends with Dylan shot, Kelly holding Dylan as the Goon calls for paramedics, and Remus apologizing, saying running away never would have fixed anything. The gun, dropped by Soot, hangs suspended in midair over the Seine, refusing to fall.

That suspended gun is the novel's image of grief itself: a moment arrested in time, neither falling nor rising, neither resolved nor released. Soot lets go of the gun, but it does not fall. The past, the novel suggests, is like that — it hangs there, refusing to complete its trajectory, even after you have let it go. The teeth inspection scene, in which Remus examines Soot's mouth in the alley, similarly underscores the body's vulnerability — a reminder that mortality is written into the flesh, not subject to revision. The novel's symbolic landscape — the gun, the black peacock, the teeth inspection, the phrase “people like us” — all orbit the same thematic core: the past cannot be revised.

The Collective Time Travel

In the aftermath of his campus talk, Soot reflects on the cycle of American grief: the anger, the weeping, the marching, the protesting, the moving forward — and then the exhaustion, the foot off the gas, the slide back to the same moment. He observes that this is a type of time travel everyone is caught in. This extends the theme beyond Soot's personal loss to a national condition. The country, like Soot, keeps revisiting the same scenes of violence and loss, hoping that this time the outcome will be different. It never is.

The narrator wishes for a word — a word for continuing to live when a part of you has died, a word for admitting that the person you love is not here and yet you have had a good day, a word for raging at time. The absence of such a word is itself meaningful. Grief, the novel suggests, is a condition for which language has not yet caught up. It is a form of time travel that no one has named.

Complexity and Contradiction

The novel's treatment of this theme is not simple. Soot both knows and does not know that he cannot change the past. He tells Tasha he has checked everything, that they were good parents, that it is not their fault — and then he continues to search for the moment where it all went wrong. He tells Vivian she is not to blame — and then he blames her anyway. He accepts that Mia will not come back — and then he asks if they can stay in this time.

The contradiction is not a flaw in the novel; it is the point. Grief is not logical. It is a condition in which knowledge and desire are perpetually at war. Soot knows the past cannot be changed, but he cannot stop trying to change it. The novel's time travel is both real and not real — a literal mechanism and a psychological description. The reader is never told which. That ambiguity is the novel's most honest representation of grief: it feels like time travel, even when it is only memory.

Mia's final question — why else do you think you're writing this? — suggests that the novel itself is Soot's attempt to do what he cannot do: to revisit the past, to hold his daughter in the present, to make the loss bearable through the act of telling. The writing does not change what happened. But it might, the novel suggests, be the closest thing to time travel that exists.

Study Questions

1. How does Soot's claim of time travel function as both a literal plot device and a metaphor for grief?

Soot tells Tasha he can travel through time, and she responds that this is called memory. The novel never resolves whether his time travel is real. Instead, it uses the claim to dramatize how grief operates: as a compulsive revisiting of moments that cannot be altered. The time travel is both a narrative mechanism and a psychological description of the grieving mind.

2. What does the hide-and-seek scene reveal about the relationship between memory and the desire to fix the past?

The scene shifts from a warm domestic memory to Mia at sixteen, wearing the dress he found her dead in. She tells him he cannot fix what has happened and that he does not get to choose whether to live with it. Her line about people like us connects Soot's personal grief to a broader human condition — the desire to repair what cannot be repaired.

3. How does the novel use the character of Vivian to explore grief's need for a cause?

Soot becomes convinced that Vivian's suicidal despair is the origin of Mia's death. He accuses her directly, then later tries to blame her even though he knows it is not true. The narrator's observation that one person's sadness could not change his daughter any more than rain changes the path of the moon shows that grief searches for a culprit even when no culprit exists.

4. What does the suspended gun symbolize in the context of the theme?

The gun that hangs in midair over the Seine, refusing to fall, is an image of grief itself: a moment arrested in time, neither resolved nor released. Soot lets go of the gun, but it does not fall — just as he lets go of the past, but it does not recede.

5. How does the novel extend the theme of time travel beyond Soot's personal loss to a collective condition?

In the aftermath of his campus talk, Soot reflects on the cycle of American grief — anger, protest, moving forward, then sliding back to the same moment. He calls this a type of time travel everyone is caught in. The novel suggests that the country, like Soot, keeps revisiting scenes of violence and loss, hoping for a different outcome that never comes.