Review: The Other Americans

The Other Americans by Laila Lalami
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There’s a strong novel buried in the book we get here. In fact, I’d even say there are two potentially strong novels here. As it is, though, neither gets either the room or the attention really to shine out, and the result is a novel substantially weaker than Lalami’s earlier, excellent The Moor’s Account.

The Moor’s Account shone because it offered a different foundational narrative for America. Our narrator, Mustafa/Estebanico, is a Muslim slave of a would-be Spanish conquistador, and he takes part in a dramatically failed expedition to find gold in modern day Florida. It’s a big topic told from the striking perspective of a man of color, a Muslim, a slave, and someone opposed to the whole colonial project.

Yet, in a way, he is an “other American,” himself – a figure whose story informs our larger American one even as he falls outside of the histories we tell ourselves.

If The Moor’s Account is a sustained (and successful) exercise in voice, this is a quilt of different voices. Instead of sustained chapters in which Mustafa/Estebanico sorts through the contradictions of his life and addresses his fears that he will be forgotten, we get short chapters from a range of different perspectives. The book seldom sits still long enough to give us a developed character. Above all, for me at least, this falls short because of the way it interrupts one account after another, deferring not just plot points but the full expression of the characters we encounter.

That said, the premise – or I should say the original premise – is very strong. A Muslim restaurant owner is killed in a hit-and-run that might have been a hate crime.

In the first half of the book, we have a kind of whodunit, with the victim’s daughter – Nora, our central character – intent on figuring out who’s guilty. There’s a sub-plot of an undocumented Mexican-American man who witnessed a part of the accident who has to decide whether to report what he saw, or almost saw. There’s another about a high school friend of Nora’s who kindles a you-can-see-it-coming romance with her. And there’s a sister who, seemingly perfect in her American success, is hiding a painkiller addition. And there’s the older white man who owns the bowling alley next door and nurses a politics of resentment. And there is the African-American female detective who, good at her job also juggles the responsibilities of being a worried mother. And there is the mother who wishes she’d never come to America. And there is the dead father who, conveniently, supplies flashbacks just in time to resolve seeming mysteries.

So, yeah, I don’t think it’s much of a mystery, and I don’t think Lalami does either. Roughly halfway through we [SPOILER:] learn that the car that hit Driss was owned by the bowling alley owner next door.

At that point, the premise seems to shift from solving a mystery to coming to terms with the seeming reality that it’s hard to find the line between accident and malice. Oh, and while we’re at it, Nora’s romance with Jeremy heats up so that she is both angrily grieving her father and instantly falling in love with someone she hasn’t thought of since high school.

I think the best of the novel deals with the gray area of the crime/accident, and Lalami has some moments of impressive insight all along. She does a strong job bringing the mother’s voice forward, and she often gets off a strong inner monologue for a character in the midst of an emotional crisis. But, since none of that is sustained and we have so wide a range of different characters, those insights seldom accumulate into something sustained and moving.

[SECOND SPOILER:] At the end, just as the novel seems to lean into its premise that love, mourning, racism, and what it means to be an American all situate in a gray area, we learn that the real culprit isn’t the bowling alley owner but his son, a long-time bully of Nora and Jeremy. He is the epitome of the ugly American, someone who’s self-satisfied and – this being the age of Trump – reasserting the privilege of his nativism and racism.

Oh, and Nora – having dumped Jeremy to return to her life as a contemporary composer – returns in the final pages to reconcile with Jeremy. Happy, sort of, ever after.

There are glimpses of skill here, though not enough to make me quite understand how the same author wrote this and The Moor’s Account. This is, ultimately, conventional even as it thoughtfully weaves a Muslim-American perspective into a larger vision of an “other America.” In contrast, The Moor’s Account, committing to one voice and one larger question, asks a similar question in a singular, tragic voice.


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