The Other Americans
From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Moor’s Account, here is a timely and powerful new novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant — at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture.
Late one spring night, as Driss Guerraoui is walking across a darkened intersection in California, he’s killed by a speeding car. The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui’s daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she’d left for good; his widow, Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country; Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, an old friend of Nora’s and an Iraqi War veteran; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son’s secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself.
As the characters — deeply divided by race, religion, and class — tell their stories, connections among them emerge, even as Driss’s family confronts its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies, and love — messy and unpredictable — is born.
Author: Laila Lalami | Publisher: Pantheon
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Rating: 4 / 5
“Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember.”
The Other Americans was longlisted for the National Book Award, and it’s not difficult to see why; it’s a timely, gripping novel. I felt pulled through the story, eager to see what would happen to these characters and how they would ultimately come closer to one another (or not).
The story takes place in the aftermath of a terrible accident in which Driss, the patriarch of a Moroccan-American family, is killed in a hit-and-run one dark night. The main character is probably Nora, his younger daughter, but we also get POV chapters from his wife, from an undocumented man who saw the accident, from Jeremy (a childhood friend of Nora’s, an Iraq veteran and now a police officer), and even a few from Nora’s older sister, Driss’s neighbor and his son, and even Driss himself, in flashbacks. However, Lalami does a great job of making each character true to voice, so it’s easy to keep them all straight and recognize who’s talking.
The central question is who hit and killed Driss, and why? But circling that question are some intricate, demanding stories about Nora’s relationship with each of her family members and with Jeremy, the parts of Driss’s life previously unknown that come to light, Jeremy’s mental health and past trauma (from the war and also before that, in the aftermath of his mother’s sudden death).
Some of these stories were more resolved by the end of the book than others, and although I would have happily eaten up more details about nearly all of them, none left me feeling unfulfilled. Overall, you can definitely feel where the arc of the novel is heading, but that doesn’t bother me; as a reader, I was eager to see how that arc would take shape along the way.
Lalami does a great job of using flashbacks in this novel, and I think that’s one of the main points; the past — our own trauma, our generational trauma — shapes the present, but the actual shape of the present depends on who’s remembering that past. I was always happy to drop into a flashback with Jeremy, who my heart squeezes for, or one of Nora’s about Driss, or the same memory by her mother seen through such a different lens. All this to say that the characters were very well developed, and each brought something essential and gripping to the story.
This book wasn’t earth-shattering or super literary, but the story it told was very good.