Late one night, on a dimly lit stretch of highway in a small town in the Californian Mojave desert, an elderly Moroccan has just locked up his restaurant when he’s struck by a speeding car and left for dead. A hit and run. An accident? Or something more sinister? The only witness, a Mexican worker with dubious papers, knows better than to talk to the police. And in any case, he didn’t actually see what happened: fixing his bicycle chain, he had looked up just as the man bounced off the windscreen. As he repeatedly tells himself: ‘All I saw was a man falling to the ground.’
The violent death is a catalyst, gradually revealing evasions and lies; unexpected links between people in the fag-end town where The Other Americans is set. Laila Lalami has gone for a bold, even risky form: nine narrators, divided by race, religion and social background, take over the story, resurfacing in brief, interwoven chapters. We hear the dead man’s widow; his daughter Nora, struggling to make a career as a composer; her older sister, apparently contented with her conventional life; the nervous not-quite witness; an old classmate and admirer of Nora, traumatised by his time in the Iraq war. There are neighbours resentful of an immigrant’s success. Even the dead man speaks, in flashback. The cop in charge of the case, scrupulously pursuing the truth, is an African–American with her own family problems. Through their differing voices we build up a picture of their lives, and of the town itself with its conflicting loyalties and feuds; its fierce desert heat, the Santa Ana wind ‘bringing fury and fire’, the arid beauty of the surrounding landscape.
This is not Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post territory, with cute family Thanksgivings and kids going fishing with dad.
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