The Other Americans
By Laila Lalami
The Other Americans begins with three short chapters from different perspectives, setting the plot for the rest of the novel. Nora, Jeremy, Efraín. The cycle begins again. Nora, Jeremy, Maryam. A new character introducing a different perspective and some additional storylines that may twist out. From there it begins to ping pong to different characters who have varying degrees of involvement in the plot. By the end of the book, Nora and Jeremy are the clear main characters, with a handful of others supporting the story, and a wide field of people who’s chapters lose purpose as the story oversaturates with its points of view.
The writing in The Other Americans is consistently really good. It’s clear that Laila Lalami is very talented at what she does, and I was never bored reading the individual sections of the book. The problem I kept running into was figuring out why I needed to care about a plotline assigned to a character, when there was something bigger going on, or there was a competing story from another character that had just been introduced. Efraín is an immigrant who witnesses the inciting incident of the novel. He has a few more chapters after that, some no longer than two pages. His stakes are raised so high that every time he interacts with a character, there is another opportunity for his deportation. At the same time, no other characters do much more than mention him as “a witness” and his story goes nowhere, even doing little to forward the main plot. Most characters aside from Nora and Jeremy are like this, made worse when Lalami writes them truly interesting character development that could take over swathes of the novel to resolve or play out.
It doesn’t feel fair to the characters that their daily struggles get layed out for the reader, only to have them, or their story, disappear into the background of an otherwise decently interesting story. The Other Americans would have been much more impactful of a read for me if it had cut the spare characters back and let a more focused group go through the depths of the major plot; or just cut the driving force and simply been a book about Lalami’s characters navigating their relationships and how they intersect, whether they know it or not. I hate to say that I loved the many characters when I disliked the book itself so much. I kept saying to myself “so who exactly are the other americans?” because I could not figure out what the book was trying to say with its title and themes. I guess the answer is immigrants, but there are so many whiffs in that regard that it felt more like when a touring act gives a speech about this city being the best in the country, only to say the same thing a state over the next day.
The book ends with too-tidey of a bow for me, and in some ways unwrites a lot of character development for the sake of a happy ending. Some of the sub-character’s plots go so nowhere that it feels almost insulting to people who might see their lives reflected in those chapters. Others are just frustrating because they feel antithetical to the happy ending presented, like driving into the sunset with a flat tire, but cutting before we see that there’s no spare in the trunk. For all I know, it could just be a matter of taste. Whoever the other americans are, I couldn’t find them, and I don’t think you will either.