The other Americans

Review by New York Times Review

The title of Laila Lalami's fourth novel, "The Other Americans," perfectly sums up a unified disunity: an America suspicious of its own body politic. Set in the towns of the Mojave Desert, the novel is narrated by nine different characters. Perhaps surprisingly, all of the novel's speakers - regardless of race, class, gender, political affiliation, legal status or place of birth - see themselves as outsiders to mainstream American identity. This is a powerful setup, raising the question of whether anyone feels that today's America is one to which he or she belongs. In fact, Lalami's nine speakers have much in common. They all face obstacles to stable employment, are alienated from their neighbors and have a strong sense of being misunderstood not only by society but by their families. They share, too, a deep attachment to the specific landscape of the Mojave Desert. The novel begins in the near present. "My father was killed on a spring night four years ago," Nora Guerraoui says, "while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland." Her parents, Mohammed Driss and Maryam, immigrants from Morocco, have been living near Joshua Tree National Park for 35 years. In the aftermath of 9/11, their business, Aladdin Donuts, was torched in a hate crime. Nora tells us that, back then, her mother turned to the Quran for solace. Every morning she would throw out all her husband's beer, and every evening he would return home with another six-pack: "He complained he was not free in his own home; she said she did not feel safe in it." Nora's father, cheerfully resilient, bought a new restaurant, the Pantry, and nurtured it into a success: "What could be more American than that?" In the spring of 2014, Driss (he goes by his middle name) is killed by a hit-and-run driver. From the very beginning, Nora is convinced this was no accident. But first she must wait for the police, led by the wry Detective Erica Coleman, to uncover the driver's identity. The lines between accident, reckless endangerment and murder are immediately blurred. For Nora, in a community where resentment and mistrust have festered into enmity, there can be no accidents: It must have been murder. "I know it was," she says. "I know it in my bones." With each chapter narrated by a different character, the novel feels fascinatingly encased in a superstructure made of glass. Much can be seen, but the world is crucially divided. Nora is the novel's focal voice. Although she is ever-present, she is elusive, a puzzle inside a puzzle. She is a jazz composer with synesthesia, a substitute teacher, a reader of James Baldwin and a graduate of Stanford. Her family chides her for having her "head in the clouds." In the days after her father's death, she cannot "understand why people were visiting the house so soon" and seems largely shielded from the innumerable heartbreaking decisions that follow in the wake of a loved one's death. She dismisses the idea that her older sister, Salma, a mother of young twins, might be hurt that Nora was the sole beneficiary of their father's $250,000 life insurance policy ("But how had our father disfavored her?"); and disregards her mother's irritation that Nora, suddenly leaving town, has left food to rot in the fridge. Her father loved the desert, Nora says, "God only knows why." Nora is passionate and fierce, and in pursuing the truth of her father's death, knows the challenges she faces: "Growing up in this town, I had long ago learned that the savagery of a man named Mohammed was rarely questioned, but his humanity always had to be proven." Nora and Jeremy Górecki, a former classmate who served five years in Iraq, become lovers soon after she returns home, but whether they can come to know and trust each other - whether fissures of race, politics and belonging are surmountable - is a question that troubles them both. Together they seek something that is fragile but perhaps attainable: the understanding and sympathy of a single individual. "What was it about him that had tempted me?" Nora asks herself, answering that "he was a good listener, had sought me out, tried to console me." Jeremy, in turn, is drawn to the idea that "all my secrets were bare to her." Their world - a post-9/11, post-Iraq-war America of declining productivity - is in flux, and they are heirs to, and implicated in, a widening uncertainty. Nora describes her unhappiness as "aimless fury." Slowly the novel opens into a collective confessional. We hear the voice of an undocumented immigrant supporting his two American-born children; a young man whose business enterprise has collapsed and whose thoughts are laden with white supremacist ideas; an African-American detective trying to mother a reticent son; a 78-year-old father who wants to believe in a young man's goodness. Their experiences stand in stark contrast, but their language, cadence and diction are surprisingly similar. The hit-and-run death may have kick-started their monologues, but every speaker is gripped by his or her own private world and by consuming emotional wounds. WHO IS RECEIVING these confessions? Sometimes it seems the characters are speaking to themselves, an investigator or even the novelist herself. It occurred to me that there is no listener. The glass walls encapsulating the different narrators appear to be soundproof. Not a single character has a person in whom to truly confide. It matters desperately whether Driss's death is an accident, an act of recklessness or murder, and whether we believe we can separate these things. At the core of "The Other Americans" is a deep anxiety: What if the truth is contradictory or so obfuscated that we lose the will to pursue it? For the reader, the novel presents something of a Rorschach test. Will our belief and sympathy depend on the speaker's racial or gender identity, or perhaps his or her age? What if the perpetrators have no interest in being forgiven? What if we never really believed in truth, only persuasion? These questions are relevant to Driss's death, and to Jeremy's repressed memories of military actions, accidents and heedless behavior during the Iraq war. Jeremy, who yearns to find a redemptive love with Nora, is the most compelling character. But it's clear there is much we don't know about his rage, guilt and posttraumatic stress. He would remain "an incomplete story," Jeremy says. "To tell her the whole of it was to risk her judgment, and I already judged myself every day." Incompleteness is the essence, too, of the characters who barely speak. The perspectives of Nora's mother, Maryam, and sister, Salma, are crucial but remain in the background (perhaps Maryam's reserve can be traced to her quip that "Americans loved to confess on television"). Other narrators - whose stories are fundamental to the plot - are intentionally underdeveloped. Around these gaps, "The Other Americans" becomes a novel threaded into our present: Its characters are troubled and distracted, they desire change, but they know less and less how to alter a hardened reality. The only hope, Nora comes to believe, might be to change oneself, to see beyond the contours of one's experience, and refuse the glass rooms from which we have surveilled one another while remaining strangers. Her society is at a crossroads: It can choose to become a nation of citizens or a nation of enemies. A country united in loneliness; perhaps this is the existing imperfect union on its way, through mourning and anger, to something more equal. What if the truth is so complicated that we lose the will to pursue it? MADELEINE thien'S most recent novel is "Do Not Say We Have Nothing." She is aprofessor of English at Brooklyn College.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 12, 2019]

---

Review by Booklist Review

Who killed Driss Guerraoui? Was it an accident, a hit-and-run in the wee hours of the morning? Or was it murder, a brutal act against the Moroccan immigrant who might pose a threat to a neighborhood business in a small Mojave-desert town? The mystery at the center of Lalami's (The Moor's Account, 2014) novel brings together an intriguing set of characters, including Driss' daughter, Nora, a struggling composer who returns home to the remnants of her family. There's Maryam, Driss' wife, who misses her native country; Iraq War veteran Jeremy, who is battling his own demons while trying to help Nora; and African American detective Coleman, who is trying to work out the mechanics of the case while facing her own domestic challenges. Now and then the story is nearly drowned out by the nine narrating voices, yet Lalami impressively conducts this chorus of flawed yet graceful human beings to mellifluous effect. I didn't know which version of the past I could trust, which story was supported by the facts and which had been reshaped to fit them, whether out of grief or out of malice, Coleman worries. An eloquent reminder that frame of reference is everything when defining the other. --Poornima Apte Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Lalami's powerful third novel, after 2014's Pulitzer Prize finalist The Moor's Account, uses nine narrators to probe the schisms of American community. When Driss Guerraoui is killed in a hit-and-run, his single daughter Nora-a struggling composer who survives by substitute teaching-leaves Oakland for her parents' home in Yucca Valley. There she navigates her strained relationships with her mother Maryam, who hopes she will abandon music for a law degree, and sister Salma, who unlike Nora chose a conventional path of marriage, children, and a lucrative career. As Nora grapples with grief for her supportive father and pushes the police to find the driver who killed him, her encounters with Jeremy Gorecki, a former elementary school classmate, lead to intimacy she isn't sure she wants. Nora, whose parents emigrated from Morocco in 1981, initially worries that Jeremy, a veteran traumatized by his time in Iraq, represents an American aggression that she fears, even as their relationship deepens. The novel depicts characters who are individually treated differently because of his or her race, religion, or immigration histories, but its focus is the sense of alienation all of them share. In a narrative that succeeds as mystery and love story, family and character study, Lalami captures the complex ways humans can be strangers not just outside their "tribes" but within them, as well as to themselves. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

A hit-and-run in the Mojave Desert dismantles a family and puts a structurally elegant mystery in motion.In her fourth book, Lalami is in thrilling command of her narrative gifts, reminding readers why The Moor's Account (2014) was a Pulitzer finalist. Here, she begins in the voice of Nora Guerraoui, a nascent jazz composer, who recalls: "My father was killed on a spring night four years ago, while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland." She was drinking champagne at the time. Nora's old middle school band mate, Jeremy Gorecki, an Iraq War veteran beset with insomnia, narrates the next chapter. He hears about the hit-and-run as he reports to work as a deputy sheriff. The third chapter shifts to Efran Aceves, an undocumented laborer who stops in the dark to adjust his bicycle chain and witnesses the lethal impact. Naturally, he wants no entanglement with law enforcement. With each chapter, the story baton passes seamlessly to a new or returning narrator. Readers hear from Erica Coleman, a police detective with a complacent husband and troubled son; Anderson Baker, a bowling-alley proprietor irritated over shared parking with the Guerraoui's diner; the widowed Maryam Guerraoui; and even the deceased Driss Guerraoui. Nora's parents fled political upheaval in Casablanca in 1981, roughly a decade before Lalami left Morocco herself. In the U.S., Maryam says, "Above all, I was surprised by the talk shows, the way Americans loved to confess on television." The author, who holds a doctorate in linguistics, is precise with language. She notices the subtle ways that words on a diner menu become dated, a match to the dcor: "The plates were gray. The water glasses were scratched. The gumball machine was empty." Nuanced characters drive this novel, and each voice gets its variation: Efran sarcastic, Nora often argumentative, Salma, the good Guerraoui daughter, speaks with the coiled fury of the duty-bound: "You're never late, never sick, never rude." The ending is a bit pat, but Lalami expertly mines an American penchant for rendering the "other."A crime slowly unmasks a small town's worth of resentment and yearning. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

NORA   My father was killed on a spring night four years ago, while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland. Whenever I think about that moment, these two contradictory images come to me: my father strug­gling for breath on the cracked asphalt, and me drinking champagne with my roommate, Margo. We were celebrating because Margo had received a grant from the Jerome Foundation to work on a new cham­ber piece, her second big commission that year. We'd ordered steamed mussels and shared an entrée and lingered late into the night. The waiter was trying to convince us to get the chocolate mousse for dessert when my phone rang.   I have no clear memory of what happened next. I must have told Margo the news. We must have paid the bill, put on our coats, walked the five blocks back to our apartment. A bag was packed, somehow. But I do remember driving home on the 5 freeway, in the foggy dark­ness that cloaked almond groves and orange orchards, all the while dreaming up alternate explanations: perhaps the sheriff's department had misidentified the body, or the hospital had swapped my father's records with someone else's. These possibilities were far-fetched, I knew, and yet I clung to them as I drove. Under my headlights, I could see only twenty feet ahead. But the fog lifted at dawn, and by the time I reached the Mojave, the sun was out and the sky a brazen blue.   All I could hear when I stepped into my parents' house were my heels on the travertine floor. There was a copy of Reader's Digest on the console, a set of keys on a yellow wrist coil, and a pair of sunglasses with a missing lens. One of the framed photos on the hallway wall was askew. In the living room, my mother sat on the sofa, staring at the cordless phone in her hand as though she couldn't remember how to use it. "Mom," I called, but she didn't look up. It was as if she couldn't hear me. She was still in the white shirt and black gi from her karate class the night before. Across the ottoman, the jacket of her uniform lay in a heap, the dragon appliquéd on its back a startling red.   It seemed to me then that my father was still with us--in the half-empty packet of Marlboros on the windowsill, the frayed slippers under the coffee table, the tooth marks on the pencil that stuck out from the book of crossword puzzles. Any moment now, he would walk in, smelling of coffee and hamburgers, saying, You won't believe what a customer told me this morning, and then, seeing me standing by the armchair, call out, Nora! When did you get here? His eyes would gleam with delight, he would kiss me on the cheeks, the stubble on his chin would tickle me, and I would say, Now. I just got here now.   But the doorway remained empty, and pain kicked me in the stom­ach. "I don't understand," I said, though what I meant was that I didn't believe. Disbelief had been the only constant since I'd heard the news. "I just talked to him yesterday."   My mother stirred, finally. She turned to me, and I saw that her eyes were rimmed with red and her lips cracked. "You talked to him?" she said, not without surprise. "What did he say?"   From the hallway came the rattle of the mailbox slot and the thump of the mail as it hit the floor. In its wicker basket, the cat raised its head, then went back to sleep.   "What did he say?" she asked again.   "Nothing. He said he wanted to chat with me for a bit, but I had to go teach and I wanted to get a cup of coffee in the few minutes I had left on my break. I told him I'd call him back later." My hand flew to my mouth. I could have talked to him one more time, heard the care in his voice, and yet I had squandered the chance. And all for some bitter coffee in a paper cup, hastily consumed before confronting a class of bored prep-school kids making their way through The Odyssey.   A motorcycle roared up the street and the windows shuddered. Nervously I undid the folding clasp on my watch and clicked it back in place. Then a grim silence fell on the room again. "What was Dad doing at the restaurant so late?" I asked. "Doesn't Marty usually close up?"   "He wanted to install new lights he bought, so he told Marty to go home."   And then what? He must have locked up the restaurant and walked out. Maybe he was jiggling his keys in his hands, the way he always did when he was lost in thought, or maybe he was distracted by a text on his cell phone. Either way, he didn't hear or see the car barreling down on him until it was too late. Had he suffered? Had he called out for help? How long had he lain on the asphalt before his breath ran out? Unbidden, a memory came to me of a summer party at the neighbors' house when I was four years old. They'd recently remodeled their backyard, and were showing off their new barbecue pit and seating nook to my parents. My sister ditched me; she was ten and wanted to play with the older kids. I started chasing after a pair of dragonflies, but just as my fingers closed around one of them, I fell into the pool. The water was icy and tasted like almonds. It drew me to the bottom with such force that I felt I would never draw another breath again. I was in the pool for only an instant before my father dove in after me, but in that instant my limbs froze, my chest burned, my heart nearly stopped. That pain came back to me now. "Something doesn't seem right," I said after a moment. "The one time Dad stays for close, he gets run over and killed?"   I realized too late that I had said the wrong thing, or used the wrong word. My mother began to weep. Loud, unguarded sobs that made her face flush and her shoulders heave. I crossed the living room, moved the rolled-up prayer mat out of the way, and sat beside her, holding her so close that I could feel her tremors. Everything about this moment felt strange to me--being in this house on a weekday in spring, wearing my shoes indoors, even comforting my mother as she cried. In my family, my father was the consoler. It was to him I came first whenever something bad happened to me, whether it was scrap­ing my knee on the monkey bars when I was eight, or losing another composer competition just a month earlier.   My mother wiped her nose with a crumpled tissue. "I knew some­thing was wrong when I came back from your sister's house. I went there to drop off karate patches for the children, and she asked me to stay for dinner. Then I came home, and he wasn't here."   Yet the armchair where my father usually sat still bore the imprint of his body. It was as if he were only in the next room.   "What did the police say?" I asked. "Do they have a lead?"   "No. The detective just asked a lot of questions. Did he have money troubles, did he use drugs, did he gamble, did he have enemies. Like that. I said no."   I remember being puzzled by these questions, which were so dif­ferent from those that swirled around in my head: who was driving the car and how did they hit him and why did they flee the scene? Then my gaze was drawn to the window. Outside, two blackbirds landed one after the other on the electric wire. The neighbor across the street was deflating the giant Easter bunny that had sat for weeks in his front yard, gathering dust. It stared back with grotesque eyes as its white ears collapsed under his shoes. The wind whipped the flag on the pole, and the sun beat down without mercy. Excerpted from The Other Americans: A Novel by Laila Lalami All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---