Commentary: The Other Americans
The Other Americans, by Laila Lalami, was the 2021 selection for the Deschutes public library’s A Novel Idea— an annual event where the entire Bend community is invited to read the same book together and participate in community programming around it. And so the Decolonize This Book Club read The Other Americans to join in the fun.
The Other Americans is about the Guerraoui family, Moroccan immigrants to the Mojave desert, whose patriarch dies after a fatal hit-and-run. Nora, his daughter and our protagonist, believes that the hit-and-run wasn’t an accident, but a deliberate attack against her father as one of the few Brown families in the area, and in the wake of racial tension after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. Their small town is quiet, but with so many entangled lives and secrets, it’s hard to decipher whose a threat and who isn’t.
When Nora returns to the Mojave for her father’s funeral, she finds herself wrapped up again in her old family dynamics— a perfect older sister and a worrying mother, where Nora is the one “with her head in the clouds”— a music career. Nora happens to bump into an old high school friend who becomes a warm, comfortable haven in the midst of intense grief. But Jeremy has his own secrets, a veteran of the Iraq War and now a police officer. Nora questions the relationship and worries she can’t trust even him.
Upon meeting Detective Coleman, the person assigned to her father’s case, Nora makes clear that she thinks her father was targeted. A long-time neighbor to her father’s diner, the owner of a bowling alley, was known to get into arguments with Nora’s father over the smallest things. And his son, A.J, wrote racist slurs on Nora’s locker in high school. While Coleman questions whether or not this past has any impact on the present mystery, Nora juggles her grief, fights with her sister and mother, questions about the music career she left behind in Oakland, her growing love of Jeremy, and the mystery that haunts her. The reader is guided through the narrative through various characters’ points of view, including a witness to the hit-and-run, an undocumented immigrant named Efrain, who struggles with his guilt at not coming forward with information on the car that killed Nora’s father. Though separate, their stories intermingle, connected by the thread of Driss Guerraoui’s death.
All told, I gobbled up this book. I’m not much of a mystery person, but I thoroughly enjoyed the family dynamics and was emotionally invested in Nora and Jeremy’s love story. But I agree with a few book club members who raised criticisms that the author introduced a number of hot topics but seemed to only scratch the surface, leaving readers craving a deeper exploration. For example, when Nora and Jeremy stumble upon one another at a local bar, they sit down to eat and drink together and start talking. Naturally, the war comes up and we see a brief moment of very real tension between the two: Nora sees the war in Iraq as monstrous and Jeremy took part in that violence, no matter how reluctantly. In this moment, Jeremy recognizes that Nora feels this way and he doesn’t disagree with her, yet he is ashamed. But the moment ends as quickly as it began. I was hoping for a deeper return to that topic once their relationship grew more intimate. Eagerly, I awaited that conversation, hungry to see how these two characters could bridge the gap and head-on address a controversial topic. But, they didn’t. There were recurring references to that tension between them, but we never saw it really culminate into anything else. As a writer, I understand the beauty of not wrapping everything in a neat bow. That’s not how life works. But I felt this was a missed opportunity. Perhaps in a prior draft, there was more there and perhaps the publisher (Pantheon Books) cut it out. Or maybe there wasn’t anything more to it at all. But I wish there had been.
Ultimately, The Other Americans presents dueling worldviews: nothing happens for a reason and everything has a reason. I won’t spoil the ending for those who haven’t yet read this book, but these worldviews both manifest equally in the story, conveying the complexity of life with all its tantalizing connections disguised as coincidences… or is it the other way around? Or is it both? I believe The Other Americans posits that it is indeed both. The past does impact the present, but bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people all the same. Though not a particularly mind-blowing revelation, I felt that Lalami crafted a compelling narrative around it so that the revelation danced its way through the cast of characters, pulling each one in close, then pushing them out again into the chaos. That dance, in my opinion, is the best part.