Driss Guerraoui dies in a hit-and-run accident in a small California Mojave town. Driss is a Moroccan immigrant, so there are inevitable threads of racism running through his backstory and the investigation of his death, and through the reactions of the locals to his wife Maryam and 30-year-old Moroccan-American daughter Nora. Is this a random accident with a drunk or scared driver who fled, or was Driss targeted because of his race or religion? Was it a hate crime, related to 9/11?
In Laila Lalami’s latest novel, the mystery, such as it is, revolves around the perpetrator of the hit-and-run accident, but given the cast of characters presented, it never seems like much of a mystery. This is really an immigrant, post 9/11, story.
The novel is told in multiple voices, but as with many such novels, not all the voices are equally convincing or powerful, and there are simply too many of them. Nora, the main protagonist. Driss, her father. Maryam, her mother. Jeremy Gorecki, an ex-Iraq-war veteran who has a relationship with Nora. This would have been more than enough, but Lalami also tries to humanize the less central characters by having them tell their own stories, which works even less well: there is Anderson who owns the laundromat nearby Driss’ diner; his son AJ; Efrain, the witness to the hit-and-run; Coleman, the detective … It would be hard for any author to pull off such a vast set of voices, and it’s not surprising that they blend into each other and fail to seem distinct. Unfortunately, even the main characters sound similar, and rather flat.
[Nora] I remember being puzzled by these questions, which were so different from those that swirled around my head: who was driving the car and how did they hit him and why did they flee the scene? Then my gaze was drawn to the window.
[Jeremy] As I changed out of my uniform at the end of the day, I found myself making a mental list of everything I still had to do that night. Read for my ethnic studies class. Go over my history text to prepare for my final. Turn in my English paper by email. On my way out of the station, I walked past the dry-erase board where active cases were listed.
[Efrain] No, I told myself, I hadn’t witnessed the accident. What I had really seen was a man falling to the ground and a white car speeding away in the night, and I wasn’t even sure about the color. It could be white, or maybe it was silver.
Some of them are immigrants, like the Morrocan Guerraoui parents, and Efrain who is undocumented and from El Salvador. Some are hyphenated, such as Nora, who was born and bred in America but is always viewed as ‘other’. One character is American, but othered by her race: Coleman, who is a black woman in a largely white-male police force. Lalami tries to include ‘insider’ viewpoints as well: Anderson and AJ are ‘regular Americans’ — as they would term themselves, meaning Caucasian, not first-generation, not hyphenated, and deeply suspicious of those who are unlike them.
Jeremy is also one of those Americans who have never needed to worry about how they are seen by others, but he is not xenophobic, as demonstrated by his attraction to Nora. His tour in Iraq, though, has left him with PTSD nightmares and uncomfortable awareness of the racism of his military colleagues, and some disquiet about his own involvement in the Middle East war. This, not surprisingly, becomes a major hurdle in the relationship with Nora.
Just when one thinks this novel is going to be completely predictable, with an angry-white-male assailant and a gentle dead immigrant in the aftermath of 9/11, Lalami brings in a surprise: Nora’s dead father turns out to have had his own secret. And this secret is not from the distant past, like an illegitimate child or a first love, but very much in the present. For me, this gave Driss’ otherwise unremarkable personality some unexpected depth.
This secret also adds complexity to the relationship between Driss and Maryam. Maryam’s perspective seemed like an unsatisfying collection of immigrant cliches: the scent of rose-water reminds her of Morocco, even decades later; she is in a fog after her husband dies; her baby had fits of inexplicable wailing; she was isolated and lonely when she first came to America. These are all perfectly valid feelings, even if common, but there was nothing new or distinctive about the way they were told. Most readers would really want to know her reaction to her husband’s secret, but that is dealt with briskly, without deep examination.
Lalami has some thought-provoking sentences:
Growing up in this town, I had long ago learned that the savagery of a man named Mohammed was rarely questioned, but his humanity always had to be proven.
but I thought some of the paragraphs were over-written:
[Coleman, in response to a congratulation] “Stroke of luck”, I said, and immediately regretted the modesty in my voice. Humility had been drilled in me, as it was in most of the women I knew, and I found it hard to get rid of it, even though it was frequently mistaken for inability.
The first sentence would have been enough to make the point, without spelling out Coleman’s thoughts in the second sentence.
The descriptions of the Mojave desert town were nicely done, but there was little that was unexpected about this novel.
Am always interested to hear about another immigrant novel. It is getting difficult to write such novels with fresh perspectives!