Nora is the novel’s fulcrum: Her dogged pursuit of justice keeps Coleman, the reluctant detective, on the case the unexpected windfall from her father’s life insurance policy generates tension with her mother, Maryam, and her sister, Salma her loneliness attracts her to Jeremy, an insomniac Iraq War veteran and friend from high school, situating the Guerraouis’ experience firmly within the post-9/11 moment. If The Other Americans has a singular protagonist in its sprawling cast of characters, it’s Nora Guerraoui, a struggling composer who returns to her hometown when her father, Driss, is killed in a hit-and-run. In offering such a potent alternative to Haggis’ cudgel, Lalami rebuts the film’s suggestion that racism is primarily the result of personal animus and replaces it with the understanding that it’s an application of power, a strategy for gain. She even employs a similar kaleidoscopic lens, shifting among the perspectives of nine central characters.īut Crash is a parable of chance, a randomization machine of emotional manipulations The Other Americans, though its inciting event is indeed a crash, deals in systems, structures, turning gears. Lalami sets the action in Southern California-a small town in the Mojave Desert, not the film’s indeterminate “L.A.” She, too, hinges her plot on collisions-of cars, of people, of ideologies and ethnic groups. An aggrieved white man laying his misfortunes on others.ĭown to its characters’ rough outlines, Laila Lalami’s new novel, The Other Americans, isn’t merely reminiscent of Crash (2004), director Paul Haggis’ controversial Best Picture winner: It has the air of a retelling, or perhaps a hostile takeover, using the same materials to construct a more truthful world. A working-class Latino ensnared in someone else’s crime. A no-nonsense Black detective facing high stress at home. A first-generation American and her shop-owning father.

The other americans laila lalami