‘The Other Americans’ by Laila Lalami

The front cover of this book shows a stylized drone-view type drawing of a suburb in America, with gabled houses surrounded by lush green lawn and trees. It looks just the way I imagine American suburbia to look, full of Leave-it-to-Beaver and Brady Bunch types. The ‘Other America’ in this book live in a rural town on the edge of the desert and the “other Americans” who live there are very different to this white, sanitized image.

Late at night in a small town in the Mojave Desert, California, middle-aged Driss Guerraoui, a cafe owner who originally emigrated from Morocco, is killed in a hit-and-run accident. It is assumed that it is accidental, but his daughter, Nora, believes that it was a deliberate ‘accident’ even though her grieving mother Maryam and sister Salma do not follow her in her obsession with finding the perpetrator. The local police are brought in, including Coleman, a female officer that we later learn is of African-American descent, and deputy sheriff Jeremy Gorecki, an ex-Iraq veteran who had grown up in the town and had long had a school-boy crush on Nora. Before the accident Nora had been living in Chicago, trying to carve out a career as a musician, and involved with a married man who had not followed through on his pledges to leave his wife. But when her father is killed, she returns to her home town and again becomes involved with the boys she went to school with, including Jeremy and A. J. and his father Anderson, who owned the bowling alley beside her father’s cafe. However, the accident did not go completely unseen. Efrain, an undocumented immigrant, saw the collision but fear of the authorities stopped him going to the police. He only came forward when Nora offered a generous reward, possible because of a bequest left to her by her father (a bequest resented deeply by her sister).

The story is told in a chorus of nine voices, including that of the dead man Driss. Because they are all telling the story from their own perspective, we learn much more than about just the accident and the investigation, which is rather an anti-climax as far as a police procedural goes. We see parallels between Driss and Efrain, both making a life in a new country; we learn of infidelities in Nora’s own family; we see racism and resentment being played out at multiple levels. Because they are told from each character’s point of view, we gain multiple perspectives on the same event but I feel that, as a writing technique, it’s a bit of a cop-out. The voices were not sufficiently different from each other and the author is relieved of the responsibility of tying them together. It has been done before, and it just felt a bit tired as a style.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I have Leila Lelani’s new book reserved, and I thought I’d read one of her earlier works first.