OPINION:
THE OTHER AMERICANS
By Laila Lalami
Pantheon Books, $25.95, 320 pages
Who are the eponymous other Americans of Laila Lalami’s new novel? Their surnames give the answer. The Guerraouis at the center of the story are Moroccan; then there’s Jeremy Gorecki and his army pal Fierro, with Polish and Italian ancestry; Efrain Aceves has an Hispanic name, and Coleman and Baker have Anglo names.
The Guerraouis and Aceves are recent immigrants with memories of their birth countries and sometimes less-than-welcoming experiences in America. Other families like the Bakers and Goreckis are long established. But everyone has a personal history.
Nine of the characters mull over their past with all their hopes and disappointments in the short first-person narrations that comprise this novel.
It begins when Nora Guerraoui wakes up Oakland to the news that her father, Driss, has been killed in a hit-and-run incident on the poorly lit road that runs past his restaurant near the Joshua Tree National Park in the Mojave Desert.
Nora is a struggling composer. Driss had always proudly supported her musical interests, but her mother, Maryam, still wonders why she chose not to get a medical degree. Maryam wishes Nora were more like her sister, Salma, a dentist with a thriving practice, a husband and two kids even though Salma is clearly unhappy.
Maryam and Driss haven’t been happy either. When they left Morocco, Driss was a graduate student with dangerous political affections. Prison was a serious possibility, so Maryam campaigned for them to join her brother in California. Subsequently, despite Driss’ business success, she was sorry to have left her homeland. Nothing quite satisfies her.
Nora decides that her father’s death was no accident and offers a reward for information about it. She also soon meets with policeman Jeremy Gorecki, a high school classmate who had once played with her in the school jazz group. The relationship they develop is balm for Nora’s grief and just as much for the Jeremy’s suffering from the after-effects of having served in Iraq.
But is Nora right to think her father was deliberately killed? Anderson Baker, who runs a bowling alley next to Driss’ restaurant, had long-running complaints about the restaurant customers. Could he have done it? A donut shop previously owned by Driss had been torched in the aftermath of 9/11. Are anti-immigrants now responsible for his death?
Three people can perhaps discover the truth: Jeremy Gorecki, the policeman; Coleman, the detective assigned to the case; and Efrain, who was fixing the chain on his bike, and heard the impact. “Bump. Like that. I looked up and the car was already making a turn onto the side street. The old man rolled off the hood and landed face down in the gutter.” Efrain doesn’t tell the police because he fears that any attention from them could lead to his deportation.
As Nora, Jeremy, Maryam, Driss and others tell their stories, the incident of Driss’ death (or murder as Nora believes it to be) becomes the iceberg-tip of the huge hidden history of the people who knew or loved him or have some possible connection to his death. Their stories are comparable to the performances of 12 acrobats Nora had seen on a childhood trip to Morocco. “They each performed a solitary act, and yet the effect would only be achieved when viewed in unison.” Nora tries “to put that feeling” into her music.”
Detective Coleman also deals with parts of a whole. As she digs at the question of whether Driss’ death was an accident or not, she eventually realizes “In my head I’d arranged the pieces of this case one way, but I saw clearly now that they fit together in a different way.”
This is also true of other characters. Nora is the most potent of them. She has to rearrange “the pieces” several times, not least when she learns that her father had ordered an engagement ring and therefore must have had a lover. Her tale is one of growth. So is Jeremy Gorecki’s. For others, though, there are serious disappointments and losses.
Laila Lalami describes all her characters brilliantly — literally so: They spring from the page. Readers can see many of them vividly, and empathize with the problems that shape their behavior, even while sometimes feeling irritation — notably with Maryam and her discontents. Others, like Salma, are less sharply focused but that reminds us that so it is: We see only the surface of most people; not the hidden mass of feelings that lies beneath.
The construction of this novel is deft. As the author moves among the characters’ tales, she engages different parts of our minds and hearts. Our feelings and ideas are enlarged. At the end, the Americans in these pages are no more “other” than anyone else in this nation of immigrants. The novel has done its job because of Laila Lalami’s extraordinary descriptions of personal dynamics and her evocations of place, especially the desert.
• Claire Hopley is a writer and editor in Amherst, Mass.
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