Phone orders min p&p of £1.Laila Lalami, author of The Other Americans. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. The Other Americans by Laila Lalami is published by Bloomsbury Circus (£16.99).
Unflashy almost to the point of comedy, happy to include humdrum dialogue about, say, weather or food seasoning, the novel’s round-robin mode nonetheless accumulates a kind of revelatory power, setting aside top-down commentary in favour of side-by-side juxtaposition – a narrative style that ultimately functions as a plea for more listening, as well as highlighting the quiet irony of the title, which ends up being hard to read as anything more than just “Americans”. But she complicates any snap judgment by conscientiously tracing the countless small steps to tragedy. Long before the circumstances of Driss’s death come clearly into view, it can seem that Lalami is stacking the deck against AJ, a racist bully with whom both Nora and Jeremy have unfinished business from high school. Laila Lalami: ‘accumulates a kind of revelatory power’.
No, I borrowed some money from my folks and started my own business.” “When I graduated from college,” he says, “the country was in the middle of the worst recession it had seen in a century, but I didn’t sit back and play the victim, the way so many others do all day long. The measured tone of Lalami’s narrators gives you the impression that each of them is unburdening themselves to a patient and sympathetic interviewer who, just occasionally, is being kind merely to be cruel, as when Anderson’s grown-up son AJ recalls his experience as an entrepreneur. Soon, though, we forget that we minded, absorbed by other flashpoints, including a development surrounding a longstanding feud between Nora and her sister, Salma, who chose marriage, motherhood and a career in dentistry while Nora quit medical school to make music. That Lalami allows Driss to speak for himself initially feels like a misstep, partly because his beyond-the-grave narration disrupts the novel’s logic, but mostly because it quashes early mystery generated by hints of his double life. While suspicion soon attaches to Anderson, we gradually realise everyone here carries a guilty secret of one form or another, not least Driss himself, who Nora realises had been cheating on her mother.
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